40% of IT professionals believe that public clouds are more secure than on-premise environments

40% of cybersecurity and IT professionals from private and public organizations perceive public clouds as more secure than on-premise environments, according to the latest Cloud Threat Report published by Oracle and KPMG.

Additionally, 12% believe public clouds are no more secure or insecure than what they can deliver with on-premises environments, and 2% think public clouds are less secure.

Respondents raised some concerns, however. Some IT professionals are uneasy when it comes to trusting cloud service providers (CSPs).

“Specifically, the concentration of market share by a handful of cloud services providers has 81% of our respondents concerned about the potential for complacency,” researchers said. “Another 80% of IT professionals are also concerned that the cloud service providers they do business with will become competitors in their core markets.”

Even with plenty of public cloud incidents making headlines, “customers have gotten comfortable with the security of public clouds,” the paper reads, and users “want to make sure CSPs stay vigilant and committed to strong cybersecurity measures.”

The survey also outlines how security professionals prepare and adopt new technologies to enable their business models, revealing that 88% of organizations use cloud-based services for delivering new business applications.

Nearly 9 out of 10 participants in the survey use software-as-a-service (SaaS) as their main delivery mechanism for business-critical applications, and “organizations cite, on average, a 9% increase over the next 24 months.”

Moreover, research shows that over a third of business-critical operations will be migrated to the cloud in the next 24 months. An uptick of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) adoption for delivering production applications, and platform-as-a-service usage was also observed.

55% of businesses said that 41% of server workloads will be in the cloud within 24 months, but more than a half of their servers will remain on-premise or in “customer-managed colocation facilities.”