Lack of trust tarnishes cloud's silver lining

A lack of confidence and trust in cloud computing is hampering its adoption in Europe, a new survey has claimed.

But increased use of mobile devices and the move towards employees bringing their own devices to work is expected to accelerate adoption.

According to the study by management and technology consultancy BearingPoint, Europe is particularly suspicious of the new technology, with business leaders concerned about data security, reliability and compliance.

Outperform

According to Gartner, Europe will be slower to adopt cloud technology than other regions. Worldwide, public cloud services are expected to grow by 17.7 per cent up to 2016. North America will outperform that at 19.1 per cent, with Latin America at 26.4 per cent in the same period. In contrast, western Europe’s public cloud services will grow by only 11.8 per cent.

Some of the concerns include a loss of control, legal issues and security, BearingPoint’s Michael O’Dwyer said, leading to businesses hesitating before implementing cloud technology and losing out on the benefits, including the capability to deliver services more efficiently and to cut back on capital investment.

Compliance and data privacy are real concerns for companies, and firms need to be confident that personal data, trade secrets and research data are being handled correctly.

That becomes more complicated when data is handled in different jurisdictions and across borders.

“The concerns are real and organisations need to ensure that these are addressed as part of any cloud adoption strategy,” Mr O’Dwyer said.

“In reality, most of the larger organisations providing cloud-based services usually invest in far more resilient and secure infrastructures than any individual organisation could afford to.”

‘Trust pyramid’

However, the report is of the opinion that the future of IT is the cloud, and companies are being driven towards it through increased mobility, sustainability and green IT, and “big data”, which involves the processing of large volumes of information.

The report also focused on the “cloud trust pyramid” which is intended to show organisations what they should look for in cloud partners, and how they should approach the technology to ensure that their concerns are being adequately dealt with.

“In the robust, binary world of cloud computing, trust is a fragile and imprecise variable, yet one of overwhelming importance,” said BearingPoint partner Stefan Pechardscheck, who co-authored the report.

“Trust is the red-line issue when it comes to moving processes into the cloud.”