IDG Survey Shows Strength in the Cloud, But Security Isn't Locked Down

IDG Enterprise's latest cloud computing study is out, and it points to robust trends in the cloud market for next year. The study summary is found here, and you can view a related infographic. Today, according to study findings, 72% of organizations have at least one application in the cloud or a portion of their computing infrastructure in the cloud, and they are not stopping there. Here are more details.

The study found:

Cloud investments continue to rise and enterprise organizations are investing significantly more than SMBs.

Traditional “as-a-service” models remain significant, and there’s movement towards Storage-as-a-Service, Monitoring-as-a-Service and Disaster-Recovery as-a-Service.

Sensitivity of data and importance to business determine which applications are migrating to the cloud.

Security remains the top adoption challenge, with over half of organizations saying that vendors must ensure security measures can meet their compliance requirements.

Organizations have strong relationships with cloud vendors, but vendor support is still needed to fully embrace cloud solutions.

 Among specific findings:

Enterprises surveyed are predicting they will invest an avg of $2.87M in cloud computing in 2016.

25% of total IT budgets will be allocated to cloud computing in 2016.

Security continues to be the biggest challenge enterprises face in adopting cloud computing. 

 We've written extensively about the security challenges that companies are facing in the cloud. Have you heard of the cloud access security broker (CASB) space? If not, you will be hearing about it. Keeping cloud deployments and tasks secure is a big deal at many organizations, and CipherCloud, which focuses on data protection, and the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) have formed a Cloud Security Open API Working Group to jointly define protocols and best practices for implementing cloud data security.

 Deloitte, InfoSys, Intel Security, SAP and other technology leaders are also pledging to contribute.

"Cloud is the killer app for security innovation," said Pravin Kothari, founder and CEO of CipherCloud. "But currently, inefficiencies at the technical level in the form of custom connector protocols can hold back innovations in cloud security. Defining a uniform set of standards can enable us all to operate from the same playbook. As a pioneer in CASB, we are excited to co-lead this initiative with CSA to accelerate security across clouds."

You can find out much more about these cloud security initiatives here.