A recent report shows that confidence in cloud computing security is at a historic low.
The SunGard Research study, published last week, surveyed 250 UK chief information officers (CIOs). Only 10 percent of respondents said they were “completely confident” in the security and resilience of third‑party cloud services.
Trust declines further among organisations that have experienced downtime: two‑thirds of those who had seen outages reported reduced confidence in cloud applications. Still, not all findings were negative. Sixty‑eight percent of CIOs were more comfortable outsourcing non‑critical, non‑case‑sensitive company data to cloud providers. The three categories of applications most commonly kept inside organisation firewalls were human resources, accounting and payroll.
Commenting on the results, Keith Tilley, UK managing director of SunGard, said: “It is clear from this research that while cloud adoption continues apace, CIOs are holding back from committing their most sensitive and important data to third‑party cloud providers.”
“While the newer breed of cloud providers has focused on selling the benefits of cloud, organisations are right to ask crucial questions about the security and availability of their data and infrastructure before they entrust it to a third party.”
The study also found caution among finance leaders. Forty‑two percent of CFOs expressed opposition or concerns about moving data to the cloud. CFOs were generally more conservative: 23 percent said they were unwilling to outsource any applications or infrastructure, compared with 14 percent of CIOs who held the same view.
Despite these reservations, cloud adoption is widespread. Eighty‑four percent of organisations reported moving a number of applications to the cloud; 82 percent have migrated infrastructure components; and 42 percent plan to shift half of their infrastructure to an “as‑a‑service” model within the next year.
In summary, the report highlights a mixed landscape: strong momentum toward cloud adoption coexists with significant caution about entrusting mission‑critical systems and sensitive data to third‑party providers. Organisations continue to evaluate which workloads are suitable for cloud migration, balancing the benefits of flexibility and cost with concerns over security, availability and control.