Half of IT execs in the US see cloud as more secure than on-premise infrastructure

Some 53 percent of IT execs in the US perceive cloud as more secure than on-premise infrastructure, while the majority in Germany and the UK trust their own data centers most, according to a Bitdefender survey of more than 500 IT decision makers at companies in the US, the UK and Germany with more than 1,000 PCs.

Hybrid infrastructures, a mix of public cloud services and privately owned data centers, have become the major architecture in the enterprise environment, and CIOs have to adapt to the new world. This survey, carried out by iSense Solutions, reveals why companies virtualize, which countries CIOs trust and what kind of data companies care most about.

By 2025, some 80% of corporate data centers will disappear as the cloud becomes the primary deployment for information technology, according to recent predictions. The hybrid approach of blending the cloud and the data center has already become a reality. According to researcher MarketsandMarkets, the hybrid cloud market is growing far faster than the overall IT market and will achieve compound annual growth of 27% until 2019. The market is expected to surpass $50-billion this year, double the $25 billion registered in 2014. Analysts expect the hybrid cloud market to reach $85 billion in 2019.(source: WSJ) According to advisory company Gartner, by 2019, more than 30 percent of the 100 largest vendors’ new software investments will have shifted from cloud-first to cloud-only. Companies that have heavily invested in their own private data centers are the first to embrace the hybrid approach.

A Bitdefender report published in December, 2016 shows most companies have experienced cloud security incidents such as lack of visibility (51%), a lack of policies (41%) and potential access by unauthorized devices (34%). Gartner recently predicted that the cloud will most commonly be used in a hybrid manner by 2020, and emphasized that purely off-cloud operations will largely disappear by the end of the decade. The advisory company estimates that, by 2019, new software investments of more than 30 of the 100 largest vendors will have shifted from cloud-first to cloud-only.

However, companies choose to virtualize more hardware by substituting it with less expensive and more versatile software, as shown in a previous Bitdefender survey. US IT decision makers say hybrid environments allow more flexibility and room for expansion, while they also increase productivity and security. Most US respondents even place security as their third-most important argument for migrating to the cloud (53%), far more than Germans (36%) and Britons (37%). Cost-effectiveness is one of the top three reasons mentioned by IT decision makers from enterprises in the UK and Germany.

Read the full white paper here