New EIU Study Highlights Fears, Failures and Fallacies of Public Cloud
A new study released by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in conjunction with Hitachi Data Systems has touched on several key issues that have prevented some organizations from adopting public cloud solutions.
One of the biggest gems found in the report deals with issues that plague public cloud apps and services. The report found that these issues typically stem from the users administrating the apps and infrastructure, not the actual public cloud provider itself.
The EIU found that 36% of those who responded to their survey said that their public cloud outages were a result of something happening inside their organization at the administration level. Another 29% mentioned that their outages were provider related. The remainder of respondents indicated that they were not aware of any outages at all.
The report goes on to mention that public cloud sees more failures than private cloud. These public cloud failures were a result of the following:
- Significant outages at the provider level
- Inability to complete integration with existing systems
- Loss of data due to a data breach
- Unskilled employees making mistakes
- Lack of organizational planning for things such as Disaster Recovery
“It would be misleading to state that public cloud is always riskier. In the early days of the cloud, users may have experienced greater security issues since the technology was not yet mature and because of their own inexperience,” says the EIU’s report. “Conversely, the bespoke nature of private clouds allows for a greater level of security, though with possibly higher initial costs,” the report concludes.
On a positive note, cloud failures have had a rarely dealt a death blow to organizations. Only 9% of respondents said that their public cloud incidents could be rated as a high risk incident. A majority (55%) said that the risks were limited while the remaining respondents put their public cloud incidents in the medium risk category.
