68% Cos Have Experienced Data Recovery Failures In Cloud

Organisations are widely migrating to the cloud to gain competitive advantages around speed, agility and flexibility according to Symantec Corp’s recent Avoiding the Hidden Costs of Cloud 2013 Survey. In fact, more than 90 percent of all organisations are at least discussing cloud, up from 75 percent a year ago. Other key survey findings showed enterprises and SMBs are experiencing escalating costs tied to rogue cloud use, complex backup and recovery, and inefficient cloud storage. Rogue clouds are defined as business groups implementing public cloud applications that are not managed by or integrated into the company’s IT infrastructure.

Industry experts predict several key issues will arise in 2013 focused on the financial pressures and security challenges of cloud computing. Business continuity is seen as an important issue with the increase in cloud outages posing greater risks than security breaches. Over the holidays, a leading cloud service provider experienced an outage, which they quickly remediated. This outage impacted businesses and posed important concerns around data loss prevention, backup, time spent on data recovery and the associated costs. However, with advance preparation, organisations can build safe, agile and efficient clouds that will enable them to meet their business goals.

“By taking control of cloud deployments, companies can seize advantage of the flexibility and cost savings associated with the cloud, while minimising the data control and security risks linked with rogue cloud use,” said Francis deSouza, Group President, Enterprise Products and Services, Symantec.

Rogue Cloud Implementations

According to the survey, rogue cloud deployments are one of the cost pitfalls. It is a surprisingly common problem, found in more than three quarters (77 percent) of businesses within the last year. It also seems to be an issue experienced more by enterprises (83 percent), due to their larger company size, than SMEs (70 percent).

Among organisations who reported rogue cloud issues, 40 percent experienced the exposure of confidential information, and more than a quarter faced account takeover issues, defacement of Web properties, or stolen goods or services. The most commonly cited reasons for undertaking rogue cloud projects were to save time and money.

Cloud Backup And Recovery Issues

Cloud is complicating backup and recovery. First, most organisations use three or more solutions to back-up their physical, virtual and cloud data—leading to increased IT inefficiencies, risk and training costs. Furthermore, 43 percent of organisations have lost cloud data (47 percent of enterprises and 36 percent of SMEs), and most (68 percent) have experienced recovery failures.

Finally, most see cloud recovery as a slow, tedious process. Only 32 percent rate this is as fast and 22 percent estimate it would take three or more days to recover from a catastrophic loss of data in the cloud.

Inefficient Cloud Storage

One of the key advantages to cloud storage is how simple it is to provision. Sometimes this simplicity leads to inefficient cloud storage. Generally, organisations strive to maintain a storage utilisation rate above 50 percent. According to the survey, cloud storage utilisation is surprisingly low at 17 percent. There is a tremendous difference in this area between enterprises (which are utilising 26 percent of their storage) and SMEs (which is a shockingly low seven percent). Furthermore, roughly half admit very little, if any, of their cloud data is deduplicated, further compounding the problem.

Compliance And eDiscovery Concerns

According to the survey, 49 percent of organisations are concerned about meeting compliance requirements in the cloud, and a slightly larger number (53 percent) are concerned about being able to prove they have met cloud compliance requirements. This concern about information in the cloud is well founded, as 23 percent of organisations have been fined for cloud privacy violations.

eDiscovery is creating additional pressure on businesses to quickly find the right information. One-third of businesses reported receiving eDiscovery requests for cloud data. Of those, two-thirds have missed their cloud discovery deadlines, leading to fines and legal risks.

Data In Transit Issues

Organisations have all sorts of assets in the cloud – such as web properties, online businesses or web applications – that require SSL certificates to protect the data in transit whether it is personal or financial information, business transactions and other online interactions. The survey showed companies found managing many SSL certificates to be highly complex: Just 27 percent rate cloud SSL certificate management as easy and only 40 percent are certain their cloud-partner’s certificates are in compliance with corporate standards.

Hidden Costs Are Easily Avoided

The survey shows ignoring these hidden costs will have a serious impact on business. However, these issues are easily mitigated with careful planning, implementation and management:

• Focus policies on information and people, not technologies or platforms

• Educate, monitor and enforce policies

• Embrace tools that are platform agnostic

• Deduplicate data in the cloud