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Research report looks at cloud growth and risks

Gigaom Research and CipherCloud have announced the results of their new ‘Shadow IT: Data Protection and Cloud Security’ study. The research examined the extent of enterprises' cloud adoption, the challenges and the risks.

The results of the study indicate that the cloud market will grow 126.5 percent this year with the majority of the growth in two areas: software-as-a-service (SaaS) growing at 199 percent and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) at 126 percent.

Top risks identified with cloud adoption

Security is the number one cloud adoption concern with 62 percent selecting this is as the top concern. Second at 44 percent were the performance of those applications, and third at 41 percent was the time needed to develop cloud related skills. The study found that IT professional consider encryption as the key aspect of security. By encryption it must be end to end from the moment that the data leaves the network to the data being stored at rest in the cloud.

Number of cloud applications adopted

Over half of survey respondents reported that they had more than 10 cloud applications in production, with a notable 32 percent indicating significant use of 51 or more cloud applications. This only includes the cloud applications that IT is aware of and controls; it does not include shadow IT cloud instances.

Growth of shadow IT

One of the big challenges is to have visibility into cloud adoption within organizations. Among line of business employees, 81 percent admitted to using unauthorized SaaS applications. 38 percent of employees deliberately went around IT in adopting applications because IT approval process in their companies is reportedly too slow.

Most popular cloud applications

The study revealed that the most commonly requested cloud applications were those related to communications, file sync-and-share and disaster recovery, followed rapidly by CRM and other sales automation tools.

The full study report can be read here (PDF).

•Date: 18th November 2014 • World •Type: Article • Topic: Cloud computing

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