Rogue cloud

Pro

23 January 2013

The relentless rush to the cloud is resulting in businesses of various sizes encountering problems with ‘rogue clouds’, complex backup and recovery, and inefficient cloud storage.

These are some of the findings of Symantec’s "Avoiding the Hidden Costs of Cloud 2013" survey. The survey defines rogue clouds as "business groups implementing public cloud applications that are not managed by or integrated into the company’s IT infrastructure", also known as Shadow IT.

The survey said that more organisations than ever, at 90% globally, are talking about cloud computing, up 15% on last year.

"By taking control of cloud deployments, companies can seize advantage of the flexibility and cost savings associated with the cloud, while minimising the data control and security risks linked with rogue cloud use," said Francis deSouza, group president, Enterprise Products and Services, Symantec.

According to the survey, rogue cloud deployments are one of the cost pitfalls. It is a common problem, found in more than three quarters (77%) of businesses within the last year. It also appears to be an issue experienced more by enterprises (83%), due to their larger company size, than smaller businesses (70%).

Among organisations who reported rogue cloud issues, 40% experienced the exposure of confidential information, and more than a quarter faced account takeover issues, defacement of web properties, or stolen goods or services. The most commonly cited reasons for undertaking rogue cloud projects were to save time and money.

According to the survey, industry experts are predicting a number of issues around cloud computing to come to the fore in 2103. Among these is an increased interest in business continuity around cloud computing as many experts now believe that cloud outages can pose greater risks than security breaches.

Cloud is complicating backup and recovery too, the survey reports. First, most organisations use three or more solutions to back-up their physical, virtual and cloud data-leading to increased IT inefficiencies, risk and training costs. Furthermore, 43% of organisations have lost cloud data (47% of enterprises and 36% of smaller businesses), and most (68%) have experienced recovery failures.

Most organisations see cloud recovery as a slow, tedious process. Only 32% rate this is as fast and 22% estimate it would take three or more days to recover from a catastrophic loss of data in the cloud.

One of the key advantages to cloud storage is simple provisioning, but this simplicity leads to inefficient cloud storage. Generally, organisations strive to maintain a storage utilisation rate above 50%. According to the survey, cloud storage utilisation is very low at 17%. There is a significant difference in usage between enterprises, which are utilising 26% of their storage, and smaller businesses at just 7%. Furthermore, roughly half admit very little, if any, of their cloud data is de-duplicated, further compounding the problem.

Ensuring data security for cloud computing is proving to be a pain point for organisations too. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificates are required to protect the data in transit. The survey showed companies found managing many SSL certificates to be highly complex. Just 27% rate cloud SSL certificate management as easy and only 40% are certain their cloud-partner’s certificates are in compliance with corporate standards.

The survey argues that ignoring the hidden costs of cloud will have a serious impact on business. However, these issues can be easily mitigated with careful planning, implementation and management. It recommends a focus on policy, information and people, not technologies or platforms. It advocates education, monitoring and the enforcement of policies. It also encourages organisations to embrace tools that are platform agnostic, and finally, emphasises the need to de-duplicate data in the cloud.

The survey was carried out among more than 3,000 organisation0s in 29 countries in the last quarter of 2012. Almost half of the responses came from smaller businesses.

TechCentral Reporters

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