Barracuda Networks Inc, a leading provider of cloud-connected security and storage solutions, announced key findings from a new global research report, Unlocking the Benefits of Public Cloud that outlines the respondents use of public cloud, benefits of public cloud, challenges with public cloud and public security.
Thiban Dharmalingam, the Regional Manager of Barracuda in Malaysia shared,This report highlights the ongoing increase in public cloud use globally, with many organizations seeing substantial process and financial benefits. However, there are still a significant number of organizations that are not clear on the shared security model and the implication to their data and applications.
Commissioned by Barracuda and conducted by Vanson Bourne, the research surveyed 1,300 IT decision makers from organizations using public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and from Asia Pacific (APAC)
“Organizations have nearly 40 percent of their infrastructure in the public cloud today, with the expectation to increase this to 70 percent over the next five years. However, organizations need to select cloud-ready security solutions that are designed for the new architectures and capabilities enabled by public and hybrid cloud adoption, explained Thiban
While four out of 10 reported that their organization relied on public cloud deployments to expand their services, often replicating those over multiple regions, 30 percent said they only migrated selected services to the cloud and kept the balance on premises.
99 percent of the respondents said that their organization has seen benefits as a result of moving to the public cloud, including greater scalability and reduced IT expenditures, concluding that organizations are growing more comfortable with hybrid environments that deploy a range of public cloud services along with more traditional on-premises infrastructure.
The survey reports, on average, that organizations didn’t use a single cloud provider for everything, and cited a number of reasons for this: Top of mind was that different providers had different strengths (63 percent), followed by the view that this increased security (51 percent) and helped keep costs down (42 percent).
However, security remains to be the biggest challenge when it comes to using the public cloud 71 percent felt that security concerns restricted their ability to migrate workloads to the public cloud. Nine out of 10 of organizations reported they worried about their use of public cloud, with cyberattacks being the chief concern at 54 percent, Thiban elaborated.
Over half respondents had experienced at least one cyberattack, and 30 percent expect this to continue in the future, ends Thiban
The challenge with security was further heightened by the nature of information stored in public clouds by organizations. Over 50 percent of all organizations store some type of personal data (personnel records, medical records, etc.) in the public cloud, and nearly the same precent (55 percent) store customer order history.
The Shared Responsibility Security Model where cloud providers are responsible for the security of the cloud, while organizations using the cloud are responsible for the security of what they put in the cloud 71 percent felt the cloud provider was responsible for customer data in the public cloud, and 66 percent for applications in the public cloud. Additionally, 52 percent were confident that their move to the cloud was secure, with three in five 62 percent responding that they had included additional security solutions in their public cloud infrastructure.
Recommendations
Organizations often end up with multiple cloud providers, as well as having an on-premises (legacy) infrastructure. This can have implications on complexity and overall costs; its further compounded when third-party solutions such as security are added to the mix. Therefore, customers are advised to look for third parties who support a wide range of ecosystems with the same or similar solutions.
As customers weigh licensing options by usage, per hour, unlimited, etc. we see customers beginning to understand how they can leverage different ones to gain greater cost controls. This becomes more important when third-party vendors are added to the mix. Customers value when third parties offer equivalent licensing options to how the customer is licensing their public cloud infrastructure.
Companies deploying the most common security routine routing branch locations traffic through a central security solution generally find these solutions lack scale and cost benefits as their cloud leverage increases. Companies that look at distributed security solutions, such as next-generation firewalls and web application firewalls, closer to the point of access reduce those issues, but find new ones in managing multiple devices. Therefore, look for vendors who can provide a common management scheme either in their products or using public cloud security infrastructures to simplify managing and monitoring ongoing security.
Barracuda solutions are cloud ready and designed for hybrid deployments. Barracuda on-premises and cloud solutions can work seamlessly together to protect customers data and applications regardless of where they reside.
