A recent survey by Barracuda Networks shows that UK public cloud adoption is lagging behind other countries in the EMEA region.
While the 550 survey respondents across the region showed increasing investment in the public cloud, UK respondents showed the lowest proportion of total IT in the public cloud at 29%. This falls well behind the leader Belgium/Netherlands, which has 41% of IT data and services in the cloud.
On average, 35% of the survey respondent IT functions are currently cloud-based, with that number expected to rise to 50% by 2019, and 62% over the next five years.
The average number of cloud providers used by a single organization is two, or three for companies based in Germany. Respondents said that their firms are using multiple cloud platforms primarily because different platforms have different strengths and weaknesses, and the belief that using more than one cloud provider at a time will help to bolster security and control costs.
Overall, 26% of companies that have reported moving IT functions to public cloud providers have noted a positive return on investment (ROI) within the first year.
Organizations in the United Kingdom were also on the low end of the scale for fully understanding cloud security responsibilities. 41% of UK respondents said that they only partially understood which party was responsible for cloud security, and 1% said that they did not understand cloud security responsibilities at all.
Barracuda noted a disconnect between perceived responsibilities for security as divided between client companies and cloud providers. The Shared Responsibility model makes cloud providers responsible for infrastructure security, while clients must secure data, applications, and software elements running in the cloud.
However, the majority of respondents said that their cloud provider was responsible for the security of data (64%), applications (61%), and operating systems (60%), all of which fall under organizational responsibility in the Shared model. This disconnect in perceived security responsibilities could cause problems in the future for organizations that are currently using public cloud platforms.
The top three barriers to public cloud adoption according to the organizations surveyed by Barracuda included a fear of cyber attacks (50%), keeping up with regulations (42%), and cost to maintain (33%).
A similar report from Rightscale, published in February, shows that security is no longer the greatest barrier to cloud adoption. For the first time, the primary barrier to cloud adoption was a lack of resources and expertise rather than concern for security.
