Fears over data loss and compliance breaches have held back UK organisations from cloud adoption according to the latest research from Veritas Technologies.
The 2020 UK Veritas Databerg Report shares perspectives from senior IT decision makers across UK enterprises. It reveals that half of 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 percent of data would be stored in the cloud within a year, but, by 2020 the number stands at 47 percent.
This slow rate of growth occurred in spite of businesses moving past the reservations that they expressed in 2015. Of those questioned, 77 percent of businesses highlighted security as a challenge to cloud adoption in 2015 compared to 59 percent today, and those with fears about the unpredictability of the cloud dropped from 49 percent to 21 percent.
“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,” said 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 “Concerns around cloud security and unpredictability may have been resolved, but they have been replaced by fear of data loss and compliance breaches, 55 percent and 54 percent respectively.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 percent of enterprise data is considered usable and business critical, whilst 28 percent is Redundant, Obsolete or Trivial (ROT), and as much as 53 percent is still considered ‘dark’, only a slight improvement on 59 percent in 2015. Dark data is information that is unclassified and untagged, so stored without the owner what it is or if it has value.
Sagoo said: “With organisations storing and handling so much dark data, compliance and data protection can seem like Herculean tasks,” said, “Moving data to multicloud environments only increases those challenges by fracturing data into multiple silos.”
Despite their fears, IT decision makers still expect 64 percent of enterprise data will be stored in the cloud within the next year, well above the current growth rate.
