In our recent survey of 250 IT decision makers across the UK, we included a question on what the barriers to adopting cloud-based DR solutions are – perhaps not surprising to most readers, security and compliance topped the list.
In reviewing the survey results with customers, partners and analysts, there has been general agreement that this is a market education issue. IT teams need to be made aware that on-premise levels of security are available when failing over to the cloud. They also need to know how to evaluate and do the ‘due-diligence’ required to ensure they are failing over to a secure cloud location. Indeed, advanced security features that are baked into cloud platforms including encryption, vulnerability scanning and anti-virus/anti-malware are in most cases beyond the levels of security that most IT teams could invest in and manage on their on-premise infrastructure.
But, even with the knowledge that these cloud security features are in place, IT teams still need to have visibility into the security of their virtual machines and be able to track and report on security for auditing and regulatory compliance purposes. This requirement drove the security and compliance reporting functionality that’s available through the iland cloud management console.
Survey respondents were also asked what they’re currently using for DR – here’s how the usage of cloud-based DR compared to on-premise DR looked in the results:
It is interesting to note that the adoption of cloud-based DR does not differ across company size – the survey results show that both larger and smaller businesses are adopting DRaaS at similar rates.
If we did this survey again in 12 months time, it would be interesting to see how much the pendulum would have shifted towards cloud-based disaster recovery.
Gartner estimates the DRaaS market will nearly triple in the next three years to a revenue point of $3.4 billion by 2019, according to its recent Magic Quadrant for Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service. And, iland itself has more than doubled our number of new DRaaS and Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) customer in the first half of 2016. These factors indicate there’s scope for usage stats between on-premise and cloud-based DR to be more 50/50 in 12 months time across the UK.
So, DRaaS adoption rates are clearly on the rise – and will be helped along even more by a transparent approach between customers and cloud providers on managing cloud security.
