Issues relating to data security and data privacy continue to dominate the mindset of corporate Britain as it transitions to the Cloud, according to the latest research findings from the Cloud Industry Forum.
For the third year in a row security (82 per cent) and privacy of data (69 per cent) remain the top concerns when it comes to migrating to the cloud, with the practicalities of access to, and bandwidth of, internet connections following soon after (51 per cent).
Andy Burton, chair of CIF and CEO of Fasthosts, commented: “After these more generic issues the focus really turns to establishing trust with cloud service providers in order to have confidence, control, reliability and to avoid commercial issues like lock-in. It is worth noting that these concerns are cited not as barriers to adoption, but as issues requiring clear answers in order to connect,”
“The pace of adoption of cloud is clearly evidenced as growing in both terms of first time adoption and subsequent phases of expansion. Satisfaction levels remain high and both new and existing workloads are being implemented in a cloud environment regardless of vertical or even organisational size,” he added.
However, the findings indicate that the background debate that consumes the most time and attention are not related to technology per se but rather relate back to the more commercial and governance issues of data security, protection, sovereignty and portability.
Andy continued: “The lack of clarity and transparency of what is permissible or acceptable verses what is possible continues at a pace and is arguably compounded by recent high profile debates over subjects like the evolution of the European Data Protection legislation.”
“CIF is committed to driving transparency of regulatory and legal constraints and education of the market on best practice in order to ensure end user perceptions are based on factual information and proportionate to the issues in hand so that rational decisions can be taken,” continued Andy.
“It was encouraging to note that in seeking credible cloud service providers end users expressed by a substantial majority (78 per cent) that they would prefer to work with vendors who are publicly certified against an industry Code of Practice (CoP). Today we are the only certified CoP and it exists as an independent benchmark of best practice and key credentials that credible cloud service providers should be able to measure up to and provide sufficient assurance of transparency, credibility and accountability to the market,” he concluded.