HyTrust Survey Finds Enterprises Favoring Private, Hybrid Clouds

On Nov.8 cloud data security company HyTrust released results of its 2017 survey of cloud adoption and deployment. The survey, which was conducted during the VMworld conference at the end of August, includes 323 responses from professionals across industries. The key findings are that public cloud adoption is on the rise and hybrid cloud environments are still popular. But the software also found that about half of enterprises won’t be in compliance with the European Union’s European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation by the May 2018 deadline. The survey also found that a surprisingly large number aren’t employing the most effective techniques to protect corporate data from cyber-attacks. Read on to learn more about what HyTrust survey found about the current state of public and private cloud computing.

In its study, HyTrust found that 33 percent of respondents are currently using Amazon’s cloud services, topping all other service providers. VMWare, which hosted the VMWorld Show Aug. 27-31 where HyTrust conducted it cloud survey, came in second with usage by 20 percent of respondents. Twelve percent of respondents said that they’re using Microsoft cloud services.

In a rather interesting finding, 22 percent of respondents told HyTrust that they don’t use the public cloud. Instead, they deploy private cloud system or have yet to make a move to the cloud at all, according to the report. This means that more enterprises are staying off the public cloud than are on any cloud platform aside from Amazon Web Services.

Looking ahead, things are looking up for the public cloud. More than three in ten respondents plan to invest in Amazon’s public cloud services, and 22 percent are eyeing VMWare. One-fifth of companies are planning to make a move to Microsoft’s public cloud. Just 3 percent are planning a move to IBM’s public cloud services.

HyTrust also analyzed corporate attitudes towards hybrid environments compared with private and public cloud services. The largest number of respondents—44 percent—said that they have a hybrid cloud deployment with one vendor. That figure dropped to 21 percent for two vendors and just 7 percent of companies have hybrid cloud deployments with three or more vendors. According to HyTrust, 28 percent of companies aren’t investing in the hybrid cloud yet.

What do companies believe are the biggest problems with the private cloud? According to HyTrust, 32 percent of professionals said they’re concerned about “uncontrolled and unmonitored” private cloud access. A quarter of respondents are worried about ransomware and malware and 24 percent said that they fear “malicious or accidental exposure of workload data.”

When asked what the greatest security risk is in the public cloud, three in ten respondents cited “malicious or accidental exposure of workload data.” It was closely followed by 26 percent of people who said uncontrolled access worries them. Then 23 percent of respondents said they worry about workloads running on “out-of-policy infrastructure.”

When asked about the EU GDPR rules on data privacy, 50 percent of companies affected by the policy admitted that they won’t be in full compliance by the end of next year. Another 29 percent of respondents said that they weren’t sure if GDPR would even affect their companies.

Encryption on the public cloud appears to be a concern for many users. In fact, 43 percent said that they employ some form of encryption using a provider like Amazon, IBM, or Microsoft. Another 28 percent of companies employ third-party encryption. Ten percent of companies, however, don’t use any encryption on the public cloud.

HyTrust found that 38 percent of companies do not hold encryption keys and 36 percent of companies said cloud providers are able to “both hold encryption keys and perform the encryption.” One-quarter of companies don’t encrypt workloads at all.

Companies using containers to improve cloud security are few and far between. More than a third of companies aren’t using containers at all and 41 percent are “evaluating” the technology. Just 12 percent of companies are using containers and 13 percent are at least testing the technology.