Cloud Outages Lead to Revenue Losses and Customer Satisfaction Fallout

While enterprises are expected to increase their cloud tech investments, cloud service outages are frequently causing them to lose business, according to a recent survey from Veritas Technologies. The accompanying “2017 Truth in Cloud Report” reveals that most organizations operate with a “cloud first” mentality in deploying new apps. But the outages often result in lost revenues and customer satisfaction declines. In addition, the findings indicate that companies may place too much trust in their cloud providers’ ability (or inclination) to protect their data. A total of 1,200 global senior IT and business decision-makers took part in the research. This slide show presents highlights from the survey, with charts provided courtesy of Veritas Technologies.

More than nine of 10 survey respondents said their organization will move infrastructure and workloads to the public cloud over the next 48 months. Within two years, respondents estimate that, on average, cloud tech investment will account for 18 percent of their budget, up from 12 percent today.

When deploying new apps/workloads, 56 percent of organizations operate with a “cloud first” mentality. But 43 percent will consider on-premises first before the cloud.

Two-thirds of companies plan to use at least two cloud service providers for infrastructure as a service (IaaS). One-quarter intend to use at least four.

Three of five organizations highly consider data privacy/security/compliance in selecting a cloud service provider. Nearly one-half consider workload performance.

More than three-quarters of respondents believe their cloud providers take care of all data privacy and compliance regulations. And 38 percent believe cloud providers are responsible for auditing to ensure compliance. Such impressions, however, may be inaccurate.

Similarly, 83 percent of respondents believe their cloud providers take care of protecting data in the cloud. More than one-half said their cloud providers are responsible for the secure transfer of data between on-premises and the cloud, as well as the backup of workloads running in the cloud. In reality, neither of these perceptions may be accurate.

Veritas Technologies reports that 36 percent of respondents admit that they’ve had cloud service disruptions. On average, organizations experience 22 minutes of downtime every month.

Among companies that had experienced a cloud service disruption, 46 percent saw a reduction in customer satisfaction. In addition, 37 percent experience a loss in revenue due to these disruptions.

Cloud “lock in”—the inability to easily transition to an alternative cloud or non-cloud model—remains a concern for 84 percent of respondents. However, close to half said that this would not inhibit their organization from accelerating cloud adoption.

When asked to rank the biggest cloud migration challenges, 38 percent of survey respondents cited a lack of in-house skills. “Complexity” was cited by 37 percent.