CloudPassage Study Reveals Increased Use of Public Cloud

There’s not much need for another study concluding that security is a road block to cloud adoption – plenty of research has proven that security in the cloud is one central consideration for enterprises. Server security fundamentals are critical in in cloud environments, especially in public cloud servers hosting applications.

According to a survey by CloudPassage, the leading cloud server security provider, of more than 200 IT professionals found that public cloud hosting are used extensively to deploy external applications.

Forty-one percent of respondents said they use public cloud servers for their external applications, while more than 36 percent of users report that they use cloud servers for deploying internal applications like ERP, CRM and HR. One-third of respondents surveyed by CloudPassage said they use cloud hosting for internal development and testing and nearly 30 percent host ecommerce application in the public cloud.

Big data might very well be the catalyst that will push adoption of public cloud into overdrive as the next most popular use for public cloud hosting is big data and media and will be a key driver in 2013 for public cloud adoption. As per research, 70 percent professionals planning to shift big data workload public cloud environments in 2013 as compared to 2012. Similarly, 31 percent plan to increase their use of cloud-based media hosting and 29 percent for internal development and testing in 2013.

Concerns about compliance and the safety of the data center in which the cloud is running is still the pain area and it was found that nearly one-third of answerers rely on their cloud provider to protect their servers. There is a positive side also. Companies have realized that security and compliance requirements can be achieved by leveraging cloud hosting.

The survey found that security and compliance in the public cloud is not just a pipedream, but a reality that will have tremendous impact on the way companies architect their computing environments. The fact that more organizations are deploying business-critical applications on public cloud infrastructure is a sign that the cloud market is poised for a dramatic uptake in adoption.

CloudPassage found that top three security concerns of public clouds are security, compliance, and loss of control. In line with the survey, 45 percent of respondents were concerned about compliance issues, which cloud be attributed to the lack of compliance guidance for companies.