Druva: Cloud Adoption Accelerates, But Security Risks Loom -

Generally speaking, cloud adoption continues to climb across all industries and markets. And it's not just a SaaS application trend. In fact, 41 precent of companies claim they're now running virtual machines in the cloud -- a 32 percent increase from last year, according to Druva's 2018 State of Virtualization in the Cloud report.

The momentum shows no signs of slowing down. Fully 90 percent of respondents said they plan to run VMs in the cloud over the coming year.

Still, cloud adoption introduces a whole new set of challenges for IT departments and MSPs. Indeed, both parties need to build end-to-end approaches for security and compliance in this new cloud world.

Or as AlienVault CEO Barmak Meftah told MSSP Alert earlier today, customers now need security that's end-to-end, edge-to-edge, and capable of protecting all the IT assets. And they need to protect, detect and respond in a simplified way.

So far, customers seem to be struggling with those security requirements. According to the Druva survey results:

54 percent of respondents have no visibility into how and if data management policies are being applied and enforced.
55 percent do not have a plan to centralize protection of their data across multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments, resulting in data silos.

As regulations like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) kick in, businesses will need to sort out those visibility, privacy and security issues quickly.

Cloud Services Adoption: It's Not About Cost Savings

So why are businesses embracing cloud services -- and opening themselves up to more complex security requirements outside of their physical offices?

The answer involves ease of management -- as in, ease to deploy, scale up or scale down -- compared to more traditional on-premises infrastructure. Moreover, about 20 percent of companies leverage the cloud to drive down IT costs -- though over half of those businesses haven't actually seen any cost savings yet from the move.

In terms of preferred cloud systems, 59 percent of customers are going to AWS and 35 percent are going to Azure, according to Druva's report. The report found that VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) was a strong contributor to AWS’s popularity.

The complete report is available here.

Additional insights from Joe Panettieri.