Cloud Adoption Is in the Forecast

McAfee

Apr 13, 2016

3 MIN READ

This blog was written by Richard Steranka.

McAfee recently released new research on the quickening pace of enterprise cloud adoption. A cloud-first shift for enterprise services has key implications for our channel partners selling and delivering security solutions.

In the new report Blue Skies Ahead? The State of Cloud Adoption, we found that respondents expect 80% percent of their IT budgets to be dedicated to cloud computing services in the next 16 months.

Our partner community plays an important role in helping our customers strike the appropriate balance of trust and caution. The demand for organizations to spin up on-demand infrastructure is exploding. Security is an integral part of helping the cloud scale quickly and safely.

Let’s help them get the security part of the equation right on the front end. Use the new Securing Hybrid Infrastructure Sales Play resources and co-op marketing collateral, which will be on the Partner Portal in the next few days. Finally, if you’re not able to click over to the full report, here is a summary of some key findings –

Cloud computing covers a wide range of services, from infrastructure to applications, in private, hybrid, and public variants. Great news for our partners. A survey of 1,200 IT professionals responsible for cloud security across eight countries revealed that:

Organizations are using more than 40 cloud services
81% of organizations surveyed identify IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) as the most likely to be deployed in the future. Think Amazon Web Service or Microsoft Azure, for example.
SaaS is seen as the least likely to be deployed, but is clearly still in the plans at 60%
More than ever, departments are storing a wide range of data in their clouds

The increased deployment of cloud services appears to be building on an implicit trust, but there are still a lot of unknowns.

More than 20% of the IT departments cannot be certain whether there are unauthorized cloud services in use, and 13% cannot say for certain what is stored in their clouds
IT departments are using a variety of methods to deal with shadow IT, including database activity monitoring (49%), next-generation firewalls (41%), and web gateways (37%)
While less than 25% of organizations have experienced unauthorized access to their cloud data or services, the continued lack of visibility is the greatest concern, expressed by 58% of those surveyed
Only 34% of respondents feel that their executives and directors fully understand the security implications of the cloud, while 20% believe that the C-suite is virtually unaware of the potential dangers