37% of Respondents Don’t Use or Plan to Use Public Cloud Storage

InformationWeek Analytics, a service for peer-based IT research and analysis,  announced the release of its research report. Cloud Storage: Changing Dynamics Beyond Services encompasses analysis of public cloud storage survey results and guides readers in making smart cloud storage decisions. More than 360 business technology decision-makers responded to this poll. The report author, Michael Biddick, is president and CTO of Fusion PPT.

Research Summary
While off-site services may have the potential to tame the voracious storage beast, most respondents are skeptical when it comes to moving valued business data to a public cloud. Security, privacy and regulatory constraints lead the list of concerns; absence of a concrete business case and worries about lack of control, potential data loss, data availability and reliability/performance also factor into companies’ reluctance to store their information in the public cloud.

Findings:  

• Only 15% of survey respondents say they currently use public storage services, and only 10% expect to explore adoption within the next two years.
• Security concerns (73%) top the list of reasons companies steer clear of public cloud storage; privacy concerns (54%) rank second, followed by regulatory/legal constraints (36%).
• 59% of survey respondents cite email as the application most responsible for data storage growth; 53% point to retention policies as a factor.
• Backup, at 76%, is the storage function moved most to the public cloud, followed by disaster recovery/business continuity (70%), file archiving (68%) and email archiving (65%); primary data storage is next, at 34%.
• The ability to move data between cloud and on-premises storage is the most important feature (rated 4.4 out of 5) for companies evaluating or using a cloud storage service, followed closely by on-demand access, data encryption and ability to establish/enforce retention policy (all 4.3).
• 76% say they’re concerned about storage expenses, yet nearly half don’t know how much storage costs, and 8% do not manage their storage resources.
• HP (30%) leads in current or planned use of cloud storage, followed by EMC (26%), Amazon S3 (25%) and IBM (21%).

"The cloud storage vendors have some major hurdles to leap," says Lorna Garey, content director of InformationWeek Analytics. "Companies are very protective of their data-and rightly so. They need more storage space and services, but they’re not going to move their critical business and customer information to a public cloud until they’re absolutely sure it’s safe and accessible."

"It’s an even bigger concern in heavily regulated industries like healthcare and finance," she adds. "Michael provides some great advice for developing a storage outsourcing strategy."