Still little faith in cloud data storage services

Data is, of course, the life-blood of businesses. So it is hardly surprising that they collectively still get twitchy at the thought of third part service providers looking after their data for them. That is, almost certainly, one of the reasons that surveys looking at user attitudes to cloud storage services invariably show that a majority of users have severe doubts about the technology.

It would be interesting to see a comparison of user interests and perceptions of cloud storage with on-premise, comparing such issues as implementation cost, cost of scaling, speed of scaling, failure rates, disaster recovery costs, and the number (and total cost) of data losses and failures to deliver as and when required.

This might be a good process through which to discover the ratio of perception to reality, for apart from anything else, if cloud-based storage services are anywhere near as bad as many users seem to think they are, then many service providers have, in practice, a real problem that needs solving badly.

A survey that shows just such a set of user responses has come from Barracuda Networks. This, for example, shows that although 83 percent of businesses surveyed back up some part of their data to the cloud, there is a strong reluctance to embrace the medium fully.  In fact, almost half (47 percent) of respondents store less than half of their data in the cloud and almost one-fifth (17 percent) do not use cloud storage at all.

To be a bit fair to the service providers here, it will in practice only be a minority of businesses that will want to store all their data in the cloud. For many, it can still make more sense to keep current working on-premise, and for some mission-critical applications it is still considered best practice to do just that.  

Of the companies surveyed that are using a cloud storage solution, over two-thirds (69 percent) consider the data they store there as sensitive.  However, almost one-fifth (16 percent) of companies surveyed have experienced problems with their cloud provider. 

Of these, 42 percent had found that the data held by their cloud provider was not secure. That, of course, does depend upon what `not secure’ actually means to the user, and must of course be compared with the service level and security ratings that they put on the data.

Meanwhile, 40 percent claimed that data held in the cloud had not been available when needed and over one-third (37 percent) said their cloud provider had actually lost their data.

Further, approximately 89 percent of the firms surveyed cited the security credentials of their cloud provider as important or very important.  Respondents said that they are more than twice as likely (53 percent vs. 23 percent) to trust a security vendor than a storage vendor to keep their data safe in the cloud.

"Businesses are under no illusion that if they're going to put sensitive data into the cloud, security must be at the top of their agenda,” said Wieland Alge, VP & GM manager EMEA, Barracuda. “The most trusted cloud providers will be those perceived as having the most secure credentials - credentials that can be earned by the integrity and reputation of the technology brands these providers use to protect their customer data."

In the UK, the survey found that just 14 percent of UK firms store everything (100 percent of data) in the cloud and, of those that do, half employ over 500 people, almost one-fifth (18 percent) do not use the cloud at all and around two-thirds (61 percent) store less than half of their data in the cloud.

Of those with data in the cloud, almost one third (30 percent) are not confident about the security of it, while 67 percent cite the security credentials of their cloud provider as very important. However, 17 percent have experienced issues with their cloud provider.

UK businesses are, however, almost twice as likely to trust a security vendor than a storage vendor to keep their data safe in the cloud.