news A new survey by Veritas has revealed that the majority of businesses are moving data to the cloud and utilising both private and public cloud services.
In its analysis, the firm suggested that this “fragmented approach” could create IT “blind spots” and increase information-based risks.
The State of the Hybrid Cloud report, commissioned by Veritas and conducted by Cicero Group, surveyed 1,800 global “IT decision makers” in organisations with at least 500-plus employees and 75TB or more data under management.
Over 135 Australian organisations were included in the survey to better understand how the nation’s businesses are adopting and using cloud technology from an information management perspective.
Veritas found that, internationally, 74% of businesses are currently using two or more cloud infrastructure vendors to support their workload requirements and 23% are using four or more vendors.
This puts the burden of protecting, managing and utilising the data across these environments largely on IT departments, suggested the firm.
Another key overall finding was that “business-critical” workloads in the public cloud are likely to double in the next 24 months. This is approximately the same rate as non-critical workloads, added Veritas.
“This trend will add additional pressure on IT departments to ensure their entire business services, not just their infrastructure, are highly available and secure,” Veritas said in a statement.
The report also looks at both how quickly and why organisations are moving data to private and public cloud services.
“We are seeing an increase in trust when moving data to the cloud, however this also translates to additional pressure for service providers to ensure high availability and the need to avoid any unplanned downtime,” said Louis Tague, Veritas’ Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand.
“This opens up new challenges for the IT department in selecting the right information protection strategies for their infrastructure, both on and off-premise, to ensure that there is no compromise to their information integrity,” he said.
In Australia, while today 34% of workloads are hosted in private clouds and 33% in public clouds, these numbers are predicted to grow at rates of 3% and 15%, respectively, over the next 12 months.
According to the report, a “sizeable” number of respondents said that certain workloads would always remain on-premises rather than migrating to the cloud.
In Australia, 19% responded that disaster recovery and relational or OLTP (on line transaction processing) databases are likely to remain on-premises, with 18% adding that they would also keep archive workloads on-premises.
Compared to respondents in other countries, Australian respondents were less likely to offer security benefits as a reason to use hybrid cloud, however, they were the most likely to cite cost benefits, as indicated by 48% of the nation’s respondents.
Finally, legacy on-premises workloads are set to decrease by 27% in the next 12 months in Australia, from the current 33% to 26%.
“This is consistent with Australian organisations’ growing appetite to adopt new technologies as they are one of the fastest adopters of private cloud architecture with 47 per cent using private cloud,” said Veritas.
Accompanying the report is an Executive Brief, which outlines four steps organisations could take to remain agile and minimise the risks of adopting a hybrid cloud approach.
These include finding and understanding blindspots; keeping complete business services and applications healthy and available; protecting, managing, and governing all data in the hybrid cloud environment; and monitoring and testing the health of hybrid cloud services and applications.
I really wish people would stop using the term ‘cloud’. Anyone remember when they were just called servers and not pushed by marketing garbage?
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