Despite the fact that a majority of IT respondents say that their cloud deployments were successful, and have saved their respective organization’s money, many still do not trust the cloud with sensitive or personal information. Moreover, some fear storing their data in the cloud due to concerns over government or legal action.
These claims come from a new study from Lieberman Software, which gauged the opinions of IT professionals towards the visibility of the cloud when it comes to storage and data management. As mentioned, more than 85% of the respondents who had undertaken cloud initiatives called them successful, and of those more than half said there was a cost savings to their company as a result.
However, the interesting data comes from the section dealing with trust. Of those respondents that moved some of their entire infrastructure to the cloud, only 46% said that it increased IT security. Only 14% of them said they keep sensitive data in the cloud, leaving 86% to admit that they keep sensitive and other critical data on their organization’s network. When asked, 51% said they simply do not trust the cloud with personal data.
Additionally, 48% of those surveyed said the thought of government or legal action deters them from keeping data in the cloud. In a blog post, Philip Lieberman, the President and CEO of Lieberman Software, wrote that there are a number of reasons why he feels that IT experts might be apprehensive about storing corporate data in the cloud, but the key issue center on surveillance, cloud legislation and data security.
“IT managers fear that they will put their data at risk by moving to a cloud provider as they are unsure they will keep the data properly protected, which could ultimately affect their job and their business. The other issue is around legislation in the cloud and the fact that IT managers do not want governments snooping around in their corporate data,” Lieberman noted.
“If a government or official body wanted to see what data a company was holding in the cloud, the cloud host involved would be legally obliged to provide them with access. This means there is very limited privacy in cloud environments,” he added. “IT managers know it is much easier to hide data within their own private networks.”