Taming the public cloud: can control be brought back in house?

Public cloud works wonders for aglilty and flexibility, but it can't shed security and control concerns, a Computing survey finds

To cloud or not to cloud? That is the question asked by thousands of IT heads across the land as they ponder the best place for their applications and data. Once asked, this question leads down rabbit holes of further possibilities. Public or private? SaaS, PaaS, IaaS or any number of new ‘as-a-service' options that have emerged in recent years.

According to a new Computing survey of 100 senior IT professionals at companies with more than 50 people, most workloads and data remain out of the cloud, with public and private cloud options accounting for around one fifth each.

Hybrid cloud, which in its truest sense means a fully integrated combination of public and private cloud services, is still a minor player, accounting for three per cent of workloads. Asked more closely about this option, which is after all frequently touted as the model of the future, 12 per cent of respondents said they were pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy while a further 48 per cent said that theirs was more of a mix'n'match approach than aiming for an integrated whole.

Public cloud services were favoured for their agility, payment model and the flexibility to spin up servers as-and-when, with top use cases being websites, testing and development, archiving, email and collaboration. However, they were marked down over security concerns. In spite of all the effort (and funds) spent by the industry to persuade people that public cloud services are just as secure as on premises, if not more so, many IT leaders are still not convinced. Security is a complex issue and a lot of it is mixed up with notions of control, which came second, and also with over-reliance on a third party, which was third. It's interesting to see how little this list has changed over the last five years.

In spite of the rise in popularity of public cloud services, with the biggest players AWS and Microsoft Azure growing at rates of close to triple figures year on year, respondents exhibited a marked preference for private cloud services, stating that if the scalability and agility of the public cloud could somehow be matched in-house, they would go for that option every time.

Can public cloud agility really be achieved in-house via an integrated hybrid approach? Join our web seminar Having the agility of public cloud inside your four walls Thursday 23rd February, 11:00am.