Businesses Making Move to Hybrid Clouds, Security Remains Key

A new study by F5 Networks finds that businesses are moving toward hybrid clouds and that there is still a lot of concern when it comes to security.

F5 asked respondents about 24 different cloud application services in areas such as security, identify and access, and found that every respondent used at least one, while 60 percent used 10 or more. Thirty percent used all 24, which illustrates the growing use of the cloud.

Four of the top five services used were security-related: 83 percent used network firewalls, 81 percent antivirus, 75 percent SSL VPN and 72 percent anti-spam to detect and stop unsolicited email.

Respondents said they would not deploy an application without security and availability services, both of which tied for the top spot at 32 percent. Other services have limited value if the application is not available and secure, F5 officials said.

F5 asked businesses what services they would be willing to give up to make the network more secure. Only 4 percent said availability, while 8 percent said performance. They also didn’t want to get rid of programmability.

Twenty-six percent of respondents said they planned to deploy DNSSEC (Domain Name System security) and identity federation services this year, while 24 percent said their priorities were server load balancing, single sign-on and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), another indication of the trend toward multiple or hybrid cloud environments.

Eighty-one percent of respondents said they plan to embrace hybrid clouds for greater flexibility and cost savings, while 20 percent said they expect to migrate more than half of their applications to the cloud.

Over the next two to five years, private clouds will have a strategic importance, said 43 percent of respondents. That was followed by software-as-a-service (SaaS) at 40 percent and public clouds (34 percent).

The applications most likely to be deployed in managed clouds are distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection (32 percent), anti-spam (29 percent), global server load balancing (28 percent), DNSSEC (27 percent) and identity federation (25 percent).

What would it take to convince respondents to adopt the cloud? Seventy-one percent said having data that is stored in the cloud being encrypted, and 51 percent said that having data encrypted as its travels across the Internet.

The biggest concern, 58 percent of respondents said, are increasingly sophisticated attacks. Fifty-two percent pointed to employees not understanding the importance of following security policies, while other issues were the complexity of security solutions (42 percent), security budgets that are too small (41 percent) and data loaded from personal device via cloud-based apps (37 percent).

People who are the most confident in shielding against an attack protect multiple attack surfaces: 57 percent protect clients, 53 percent protect requests and 44 percent protect responses.

Software-defined networking and DevOps are increasingly seen as important for enabling automation and orchestration.

In the Americas, 29 percent of respondents said SDN will be strategically important in the next two to five years. That feeling jumps to 41 percent in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and 38 percent in the Asia-Pacific region.

Forty-three percent of respondents said private clouds are strategically important, while 34 said the same for public clouds. Within each model, SDN and DevOps have varying levels of importance.

Of the respondents, 67 percent said they are using one to two frameworks, while 19 percent said they were using three frameworks, 10 percent are using four frameworks and 4 percent are using five or more.