Here comes the Sun? The Cloud is becoming less scary for businesses, according to this survey at least...

eDiscovery Daily Blog - Cloud Security Fears Diminish With Experience - eDiscovery Trends

One of the more common trends identified by thought leaders in our recently concluded thought leader series was the continued emergence of the cloud as a viable solution to manage corporate big data.  One reason for that appears to be greater acceptance of cloud security.  Now, there’s a survey that seems to confirm that trend.

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Forbes - Cloud Security Fears Diminish With Experience, Survey Shows

Security is always the leading fear among companies just starting to dip their toes into the cloud computing realm. However, as time passes and they gain experience, their security worries vanish.

That’s one of the takeaways from a recent survey of 1,068 companies conducted by RightScale, Inc. The survey’s authors report that while the benefits of the cloud increase with experience, the challenges of cloud show a sharp decrease as organizations gain expertise with cloud. Close to one-third of executives and professionals who have not yet implemented cloud say security is their top concern, a number that diminishes to 13 percent of seasoned, heavy users of cloud services (and is only the fifth-ranked concern on their list).

One-fourth of respondents did not have clouds in place, while another 22 percent were seasoned cloud veterans, the survey finds. The reduced concern about security reflects a comfort level that increases as the time spent with cloud engagements increases. That doesn’t mean slacking off on security, of course — ultimately, security is the responsibility of the end-user company.

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Rightscale - 2014 State of the Cloud Report: See the Latest Trends on Cloud Adoption

The RightScale 2014 State of the Cloud Report includes data and analysis on cloud adoption by enterprises and SMEs in a dozen industries.

Download the report to find out:

• How you compare in cloud adoption relative to other companies
• What progress enterprises are making in the journey to hybrid cloud.
• Key challenges in enterprise cloud strategy and governance.
• How DevOps and Self-Service IT align with cloud initiatives.
• Why competition among cloud providers is heating up and how you can benefit.

Executive Summary

In February 2014, RightScale surveyed 1068 technical professionals across a broad cross-section of organizations about their adoption of cloud computing.

The 2014 State of the Cloud Survey identified several key findings:

Cloud adoption reaches ubiquity.
• 94 percent of organizations surveyed are running applications or experimenting with infrastructure-as-a-service.
• 87 percent of organizations are using public cloud.

Hybrid cloud is the approach of choice.
• 74 percent of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy and more than half of those are already using both public and private cloud.

Enterprise cloud governance lags adoption.
• Less than a third of organizations have defined such critical aspects of governance as which clouds can be used, disaster recovery approaches, and cost management.

The challenge of cloud security is abating.
• The number of respondents who regard cloud security as a significant challenge has decreased among both cloud beginners and cloud pros.

Next-generation IT shapes up as Cloud + DevOps + Self-Service IT.
• Cloud-focused companies embrace DevOps (71 percent) and Self-Service IT (68 percent).

Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to dominate public cloud adoption, while other vendors battle for second place. Key findings include:
• AWS adoption is 54 percent – 4x the nearest competitor.
• Rackspace Public Cloud is second within the SMB segment.
• IaaS offerings from Google and Microsoft are gaining the interest of cloud users, with Azure leading among enterprises and Google Cloud Platform among small and midsize organizations.

The battle among private cloud technologies is shaping up as a clash of cultures between the open-source OpenStack and proprietary solutions from VMware. Findings include:
• Thirty-one percent of enterprise respondents view their VMware vSphere/vCenter environments as a private cloud.
• OpenStack is well positioned to unseat vSphere in private cloud – coming in first in interest and second in current usage.
• Microsoft System Center is waiting in the wings with a strong third position among enterprise users.

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Key for this post, "The challenge of cloud security is abating." Interesting thing is that I got the same feeling in talking with my co- attendees at Build, that there's a growth in acceptance, usage and interest. interest was VERY high at the individual level, with many talking about how they are going to use their MSDN Azure allowance to at least play with it...