Evolving fears stilt the growth of cloud adoption

The 2020 UK Veritas Databerg Report has shared perspectives from senior IT decision makers across UK enterprises.  It reveals that a 50% growth of data in cloud environments took nearly five years, rather than the 12 months organisations previously predicted.

In the last UK Databerg Report, released in 2015, IT decision makers believed 43% of data would be stored in the cloud within a year, but, by 2020 the number stands at 47%.

This slow rate of growth occurred in spite of businesses moving past the reservations that they expressed in 2015.  Of those questioned, 77% of businesses highlighted security as a challenge to cloud adoption in 2015 compared to 59% today, and those with fears about the unpredictability of the cloud dropped from 49% to 21%.

“Businesses have negotiated the cloud challenges of 2015, but old fears are being replaced by new ones – and these need to be overcome if companies are going to meet their transformational goals” commented Jasmit Sagoo, UK&I CTO at Veritas Technologies.  “Concerns around cloud security and unpredictability may have been resolved, but they have been replaced by fear of data loss and compliance breaches, 55% and 54% respectively.  This is understandable, given the wider data challenges that organisations often have, many of which can be exacerbated by a multicloud strategy.”

This year’s Databerg report suggests that only 19% of enterprise data is considered usable and business critical, whilst 28% is Redundant, Obsolete or Trivial (ROT), and as much as 53% is still considered ‘dark’, only a slight improvement on 59% in 2015.  Dark data is information that is unclassified and untagged, so stored without the owner what it is or if it has value.

“With organisations storing and handling so much dark data, compliance and data protection can seem like Herculean tasks,” said Sagoo, “Moving data to multicloud environments only increases those challenges by fracturing data into multiple silos.” 

Despite their fears, IT decision makers still expect 64% of enterprise data will be stored in the cloud within the next year, well above the current growth rate. 

Other insights from the research include:

• Reducing overall IT costs remains a key driver of cloud adoption, cited by 66% of businesses.
• Employees using cloud storage to take data out of the business is a rising concern – 31% of employees are doing so now (a ten percent increase).
• The average proportion of data which can be classified as Redundant, Obsolete or Trivial (ROT) has remained similar, dropping only slightly from 29% in 2015 to 28% in 2020.
• This is despite the proportion of organisations with a strategy for deleting ROT data increasing from 82% in 2015 to 97% in 2020.