Cloud Risk? | IDC White Paper Assessment: – Not Using Cloud Now Main Risk to Business Productivity
According to a new report (below) from a prominent market intelligence think
tank, Not using Cloud is now the greatest cloud risk to business productivity
“Cloud risk hype continues to mount,” reports David Bradshaw, a market researcher at International Data Corporation (IDC), “But underneath the hype, enterprise IT really is evolving. There are essentially two categories of cloud services — public cloud services are available to anyone with the means to pay, while private cloud services are dedicated to a single customer or smaller and larger groups, niches or verticals of customers.”
As part of its research, triggered by one of UK’s leading IT providers Computacenter, IDC discovered that 90% of corporate data center capacity is unused; 23% of organizations have multiple Cloud services in full-scale use; and 80% of employees use consumer Cloud services to fill a corporate IT gap.
How should companies select how best to mitigate Cloud risk? A first imperative is that the cloud solution selected should deliver greater business metrics than any alternative methods of meeting the same need, such as lower cost and faster implementation, lower (or no) capital costs, better fit to company needs, lower ongoing costs, and an exit plan from the software version upgrade cycle.
However, there are some serious governance issues related to cloud risk that can determine which vendors you can use or indeed if you can use cloud services at all.
IDC reports that these cloud risk issues include:
• Data location. Cloud services (and again, particularly public cloud services) have datacenters in different countries, which may or may not include your home country, but often include the U.S. There are cloud risk issues over data being located in the U.S., (The Patriot Act is not one of them)
• Data security. Ensuring that your data is at least as safe and secure as it would be on your own servers is a key part of any vendor cloud risk selection process, whether you are considering public or private cloud services, or indeed any type of service that entrusts your data to third parties
• Duties and responsibilities. When you use the services of a cloud services provider, you continue to be the data controller while the cloud services provider is the data processor.
• Portability. How easily can you take your data and processes from one cloud to another, or indeed move them back into conventional IT should you want to?
• Service level agreements. There is a considerable amount of variation in the level of service and cloud risk levels that vendors are willing to commit to.
The way IT is consumed can be transformed by Cloud, with benefits including cost, flexibility and agility. However, the challenge for most organizations is maintaining control in the face of the increasing consumerization of IT, whereby staff uses their own IT in preference to corporate devices and applications.
Additional source: Randburg IT News
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