A recent global cloud security survey conducted by Trend Micro provides a valid reason explaining why most enterprises in India face apprehension over adopting cloud computing. With the highest percentage among all surveyed countries, 55 percent of enterprise IT decision makers in India reported a security lapse or issue with their cloud provider within the last 12 months.
The global survey of 1200 U.S., UK, Germany, India, Canada and Japan IT decision makers uncovers the insecurities and concerns surrounding their journey to the cloud. It confirmed that, on the whole, enterprises are moving toward the cloud at a brisk pace and are initiating a giant multiplicative wave of new deployments.
For four technologies/services (server virtualization, VDI, public and private cloud services), market penetration numbers are significantly higher in India, U.S. and U.K. In fact, although about 10 percent of the respondents (in India?) currently have private cloud in production and roughly 15 percent have hybrid apps or public cloud in production, about half are implementing or piloting one or more of these cloud services, according to the survey.
Despite cloud computing’s growing popularity in India, confusion is still at play among enterprises, some of whom don’t recognize what cloud computing services are. When presented with a list of cloud computing services, 96 percent of the respondents said they are currently working with at least one of them. And yet, 7 percent of the same respondents said that their company has no plans to deploy any cloud [v1] computing service – a contradiction.
“Based on our data, we see about 5 times more cloud applications coming online in the next few years, yet 44 percent of the survey respondents in India reported having experienced a IT security breach. On top of that, some respondents didn’t even know they were using the cloud, much less securing it. Given that many cloud service providers do not adequately add IT resources to security, the reality is that securing your cloud environment is not an option, it’s a necessity,” said Amit Nath, country manager of India, Trend Micro.
Security is a key reason for holding back adoption of cloud technologies
In India, 60 percent of respondents pointed out that apprehension over security is a key reason for holding back their adoption of cloud computing. Generally speaking, Indian respondents expressed a higher level of concerns about adopting cloud computing services than respondents elsewhere.
“While security is one of major hindrances toward cloud adoption, India now perceives cloud services, such as performance/availability of cloud, billing and tracking of service used and lack of access to data, to be of near-equal consideration,” said Amit.
According to the survey, the top barriers respondents see in adopting cloud computing services in India are: Billing and tracking of services used (44 percent), lack of access to data (42 percent), availability of cloud services/uptime (42 percent) and lack of transparency (41 percent).
Data in the cloud is vulnerable without encryption
When it comes to public cloud in production, 93 percent of respondents in India said they encrypt data stored in the cloud. And before taking the plunge into cloud adoption, 56 percent of survey respondents said they would be more likely to consider a cloud provider if an easy to administer cloud encryption service was provided. Nevertheless, most commonly used encryption key management techniques used in the cloud today are vulnerable.
Survey methodology
1,200 IT professionals from the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Canada, India and Japan (200 respondents from each of the six countries) were invited to participate in a survey on cloud computing. These professionals, from enterprises with over 500 employees, make purchase decisions for cloud computing services, server virtualization or Virtual Desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions.