Barracuda Report reveals ongoing increase in public cloud in India

Barracuda Networks has announced key findings from a new global research report, “Unlocking the Benefits of Public Cloud”. Commissioned by Barracuda and conducted by Vanson Bourne, the research surveyed 1,300 IT decision-makers from organizations using public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) from the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and from Asia-Pacific (APAC), including India. The report outlines the respondents’ use of public cloud, benefits of public cloud, challenges with public cloud, and public cloud security.

The respondents’ use of public cloud is on the rise, as is their sophistication in working within the cloud. On average, Indian organizations have nearly 46 per cent of their infrastructure in the public cloud today. In all of APAC, more than half (52%) of respondents believe that their public cloud IaaS provider completely successfully offers strong protection of access to applications in the cloud. Just under nine in ten (89%) respondents report that their organization uses public cloud for data storage, while, almost two-thirds (65%) say the same for data recovery.

In APAC, four in 10 reported that their organization relied on public cloud deployments to expand their services, often replicating those over multiple regions, while 24 per cent said they only migrated selected services to the cloud and kept the balance on premises. Additionally, Indian respondents reported that 27.96% of their organization’s annual IT budget is spent on public cloud, on average.

“This report highlights the ongoing increase in public cloud use in India, with many organizations seeing substantial process and financial benefits. Even though most Indian respondents (93%) fully understand the public cloud security responsibility, there is still some skepticism of migrating to the public cloud due to security reasons,” said Senior Director Product Management, Barracuda Networks, Anshuman Singh.

100% of respondents report that their organization has seen benefits as a result of moving to the public cloud, with over half reporting that their organisation has seen improved security of applications (55%) and greater scalability (55%). Furthermore, of respondents whose organisation uses more than one public cloud provider, 96% believe that they would see benefits from using fewer service providers.The survey found, on average, that organizations didn’t use a single cloud provider for everything, and cited a number of reasons for this: Top of mind was that different providers had different strengths (69 per cent), followed by the view that this increased security (58 per cent) and helped keep costs down (47 per cent).

78 per cent in India felt that security concerns restricted their ability to migrate workloads to the public cloud. In APAC nine in 10 (90 per cent) of organizations reported they worried about their use of public cloud, with cyberattacks being the chief concern at 57 per cent. Phishing (53 per cent), DDoS (48 per cent), APTs (50 per cent), and ransomware (43 per cent) were the main threats that most conerned them. Over half (53%) in India had experienced at least one cyberattack. The challenge with security was further heightened with the information organizations are storing in public clouds: Of respondents whose organization stores data in the public cloud in APAC, more than nine in ten (92%) say that their organization stores sensitive data in the public cloud, with around six in ten (61%) who admit that their organization stores personal employee data in the public cloud.

Only slightly fewer say the same for customer (53%) or employee (51%) bank details, although this is likely to be higher (57% and 59%) in India, which could be due to a higher level of confidence in public cloud within the country. In India, 77 per cent were confident that their move to the cloud was secure, with three in five – 71 per cent – responding that they had included additional security solutions in their public cloud infrastructure.

Therefore, customers are advised to look for third parties who support a wide range of ecosystems with the same or similar solutions. This becomes more important when third-party vendors are added to the mix. Customers value when third parties offer equivalent licensing options to how the customer is licensing their public cloud infrastructure. Look for vendors who can provide a common management scheme – either in their products or using public cloud security infrastructures – to simplify managing and monitoring ongoing security.

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