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Amazon AWS Cloud Data Protection Survey: Customer Views

In April of this year Gartner estimated that through 2017, more than 80 percent of CIOs will be pressured by business management to evaluate migrating their data centers to cloud IaaS. However, there are still issues holding people back from pulling the trigger for cloud transformations to their infrastructure.

One of these issues appears to be cost, especially in light of the overspending that is occurring with cloud services. According to a recent survey conducted by Druva, 45 percent of the IT professionals were concerned about controlling costs in their cloud migrations.

It seems that these fears might be slightly misguided, as the survey shows that 59 percent of companies that have already moved to cloud services are citing cost savings as the biggest benefit to the move. However, the concerns don't appear to stem from the core costs of the transformation, but rather from a few other factors.

Costs Fueling Fear of Cloud Transformations

One fear IT professionals have in their cloud costs is the amount of duplicate data they are storing. From inefficient databases to messy document storage, duplicate data could end up costing companies a lot of money. Companies seem to want the data flexibility, scalability and mobility that the cloud provides but they only want to pay for what they need.

There was also concern among 62 percent of those surveyed that having multiple sites will compound their costs. The report states that with true global deduplication, however, redundant data sprawl across multiple sites can be eliminated.

As these costs rise, companies may look to move their data to another host, or bring the data back in-house. The cost to retrieve data from cloud services or egress charges, seem unnecessary now to most IT professionals. Fully 84 percent of the respondents want to eliminate egress charges altogether claiming that with the emergence of SaaS solutions for data protection, egress costs for data recovery are no longer a “necessary evil.”

Confidence in the Cloud is High

Among all of these concerns regarding cost, most professionals are confident in moving their data to cloud services. A strong 72 percent of the respondents claimed they were confident or very confident in the ability to recover data from the cloud. This confidence likely stems from the high reliability and brand recognition of cloud services like AWS. Many are so confident in the cloud that they are moving their data to the cloud to protect it -- with 54 percent stating data security and protection as the reason for leveraging the cloud.

Druva conducted its Druva 2017 AWS Cloud Data Protection Survey in November 2017 to better understand how organizations are utilizing the AWS service for secondary storage, data protection and archiving. This year’s survey was completed by over 140 IT professionals from multiple industries around the globe. The survey polled IT professionals across 20 industries, including technology, energy, financial and healthcare, regarding the state of Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud adoption, enterprise secondary storage, data protection and archiving needs.

You can download a copy of the report here. Or view the infographic summary here.