Furthermore, the research revealed that 90% of IT directors believe that cloud providers should be held more accountable and provide greater transparency and advice when it comes to data governance. As cloud adoption has continued to accelerate over the past 12 months, IT departments have found themselves supporting more complex and diversified IT infrastructures, comprising of a mixture of in-house and hosted services. In fact, over three-quarters (78%) of IT directors are concerned that cloud is actually making IT management more complicated rather than reducing the burden.
“These findings emphasise the need for service providers to do more to assist customers in transitioning to the cloud,” said Kevin Little, Head of Client Solutions at Damovo UK. “Organisations are understandably keen to move IT services into the cloud to reap the efficiency benefits and cost savings. Yet trusting an external provider with sensitive data and vital IT operations remains a major consideration for IT departments. With the infrastructure behind many cloud services transcending geographic boundaries, it’s easy to see why IT departments have anxieties about where their data is residing and remaining compliant. Furthermore, with the threat of outraged customers and finger pointing from senior management, it is equally understandable to see why IT departments have accountability concerns. It is therefore important that organisations receive the necessary guidance, transparency and SLAs from their service providers.”
The research also highlighted there still needs to be greater clarity around the real benefits of cloud services. In fact, 69% of IT directors said they have delayed their decision to move to the cloud as ‘vanilla statements’ from cloud vendors make it difficult to truly establish whether or not their services are worthwhile. For those organisations that have embraced cloud services, just over two thirds (67%) admitted that their disaster recovery and business continuity concerns had increased.
“It’s perhaps understandable that disaster recovery concerns feature so high on the agenda after the number of high profile service outages and disruption seen over the past 12 months,” added Kevin Little. “However, the growth of cloud services continues on an upwards curve, so it is it up to service providers to work closely with customers to help them achieve tangible benefits. So rather than jumping in at the deep end and moving everything to the cloud, organisations should establish which services they are happy to host in the cloud. For example, 74 percent of IT directors said that they would be more likely to embrace Unified Communications technology if they were able to deploy it via a managed private cloud. Ultimately, IT departments want to move services to the cloud, but they want the reassurance of working with providers they can trust.”
The survey of 100 IT directors at UK organisations across multiple business sectors and with more than 1,000 employees was commissioned by Damovo UK and conducted by independent research company Vanson Bourne.