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Cloud Computing: Global Adoption Rates Differ — Security, Regulatory, and Hidden Cost Concerns
Global views on the cloud differ significantly. The cloud is seeing high rates of acceptance in the US, elsewhere others are more sceptical. Maybe others are more rational? Or are they simply being left behind?
When comparing the US and UK in cloud adoption rates, for example, there are significant differences. In the US,47 percent of companies are using the cloud for capacity management, compared to 24 percent of UK businesses. 81 percent of US companies are using the cloud to help with supply chain management, while less than half of UK companies use the cloud for that purpose. UK businesses really do appear to be more careful and risk adverse than US ones do.
Charles Park, an IT law and cloud computing specialist at Pinsent Masons in the UK, says, for example, that “I think there is a more conservative approach [in the UK compared to the US] towards, for instance, security risk. The UK attitude is ‘it is inherently less safe with a third party’ whereas there is a strong argument the reverse is true, if you opt for a reputable supplier with industry-accredited security levels. The industry has generated a lot of hype, so caution, if not scepticism, is understandable.”
Security and regulatory concerns are two of the concerns that are often highlighted as reasons to avoid the cloud. But there are also some hidden costs and problems associated with the cloud, as described in a recent Symantec report:
- 29 percent of companies using the cloud have seen an increase in ‘rogue cloud’ use
- 73 percent have a hard time managing SSL certificates
- 51 percent of cloud users say that they’ve discovered duplication of over half of their data in the cloud, driving up their storage costs
- 23 percent of companies using the cloud have been fined for privacy violations
- 68 percent of companies say that they’ve suffered a recovery failure in the cloud
- 20 percent of companies say if a problem happened and cloud data needed to be recovered that it would take at least three days to restore a backup
