Security Fears Are Keeping HK Companies Away from Public Clouds
- By CDOTrends editors
- February 24, 2020
Almost three in four Hong Kong companies see security curtailing their public cloud adoption.
This is from a Barracuda Networks report, titled “Future shock: the cloud is the new network” which saw Vanson Bourne engaging 750-plus executives, individual contributors, and team managers with cloud responsibility, security is a key worry.
Cloud adoption is growing, but it seems many are worrying about the security implications. The volume and variety of threats are not helping either.
The fear is especially acute in Hong Kong, so much so they are lagging other countries in adoption.
The research notes that companies, on average, have 45% of their IT infrastructure on public cloud. Only 31% of Hong Kong respondents have done the same.
Security is the biggest concern. Overall, 70% of respondents say such concerns impacted public cloud adoption; in Hong Kong, the number increases to 78%.
When digging into these security fears, respondents point to security of public cloud infrastructure, the impact of cyberattacks, and the security of applications deployed in public cloud.
In Hong Kong, cyberattacks are the biggest contributor to public cloud adoption features. The report notes that 86% of Hong Kong respondents were victims of a cyberattack, 11% higher than overall respondents. The figure also suggests Hong Kong is more vulnerable to cyberattacks.
Top three threats in Hong Kong are exposure of corporate network to intrusion/attacks, ransomware and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Integration and network is the second reason for slower public cloud adoption. Key issues include public cloud-legacy integration, integration with private clouds and integration with on-premises infrastructure.
Compliance and regulations are also keeping adoption rate low. The report highlights that 28% of Hong Kong respondents find keeping up with regulations, such as GDPR, PCI and HAPPA, a barrier to grow their public cloud usage.
Yet, it is not all doom and gloom. The report notes that Hong Kong will see a faster adoption rate at 37% as the territory catches up with public cloud adoption. In five years, it will see 68% of IT infrastructure running public cloud. Part of the reason can also be better native network functionality offered by cloud platform companies.
“As more IT infrastructure moves to public cloud, cloud providers will offer more native network capabilities, and public cloud will expand to include more network functionality,” says James Forbes-May, vice president, Asia Pacific & Japan, Barracuda Networks.
“The vast majority of organizations need their security vendors to offer advanced security and cloud connectivity tightly integrated with the major cloud platforms,” he adds.