Forty percent of large UK businesses expect to run on cloud-only infrastructure by 2021, according endpoint protection specialist McAfee, which tasked CensusWide with surveying 1310 senior IT staff last month for a survey which reveals how sustained momentum toward the cloud is.
Seven in ten UK firms expect to rely on the cloud for all of their business services within the next two to three years meanwhile.
A smaller but still notable percentage (14) of senior IT staff working within the UK don’t believe they will become a cloud-first business anytime soon, with a few of those saying they don’t think there is any business appetite to transition to a cloud-first company. (The three key concerns of moving to the cloud were security, data access and compliance fears.)
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Despite this small percentage of never-clouders, Nigel Hawthorn, director of cloud security business at McAfee believes that “non-cloud computing is a thing of the past. Whether businesses are close to cloud-only status or still shifting towards a cloud-first approach, the age of cloud is already here.”
According to McAfee UK firms are seeing a positive return after moving to the cloud with the vast majority of those surveyed, 88 percent, commenting that they are seeing a demonstrable increase in productivity. While 84 percent claimed it had improved the company’s cybersecurity around data storage.
(Cynics, scoff away…)
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Interestingly out of the firms in the UK that were surveyed nearly half (45 percent) said that they store sensitive and business critical data in the cloud. Under GDPR, companies are responsible for the data they have gathered, even if it is stored in a third-party supplier’s infrastructure. (34 percent thought this was the IT manager’s responsibility: 19 percent said the CIO).
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Raj Samani, chief scientist and McAfee fellow commented that: “Data and applications have shifted to the cloud – and where they go, cybercriminals will try to follow. We’re now in a new era of cloud-native data breaches. As we shift towards a cloud-only or cloud-first business environment, organisations must adapt their security technology and processes to close the gap between cloud adoption and secure enablement in the enterprise. Businesses will need to adopt cloud-native security tools that are purpose-built for cloud security. If
