When implementing a cloud strategy, security leaders are running into challenges such as controlling cloud costs, data privacy and security challenges, and lack of cloud security skills/expertise, according to Foundry’s 2022 Cloud Computing Survey. 

According to Foundry’s report, which surveyed IT decision-makers (ITDMs) in North America, EMEA, and APAC, 69% of respondents agree that their organization has accelerated migration to the cloud over the past 12 months. This number increases to 76% for enterprise organizations but lessens (64%) for those at SMBs.

When asked about the top cloud growth areas, more than half of ITDMs stated software-as-a-service (52%), followed by platform-as-a-service (38%), security-as-a-service (37%), infrastructure-as-a-service (36%) and cloud-based analytics (33%). Cloud-based analytics rises to 38% for enterprise organizations compared to 29% for SMBs.

The report also found that half of ITDMs said their organization’s total IT environment is “some on cloud but mostly on-premises,” while over a third (34%) is “mostly cloud but some on-premises,” and 7% is “all cloud.” However, over the next 18 months, this is expected to shift in favor of the cloud, with 46% of respondents saying their organization’s total IT environment will be “mostly cloud but some on-premises,” and 17% will be “all cloud.”

Looking at the status of hybrid or multi-cloud intentions, 36% of respondents say they are currently evaluating or researching a hybrid or multi-cloud approach. Almost one-fifth (19%) of organizations are deploying a hybrid architecture, whereas 10% have fully deployed a hybrid cloud architecture and are not deploying multi-cloud. When it comes to multi-cloud architecture, 11% said they are in the process of deploying one, and 7% said they have already fully deployed a multi-cloud architecture.

Cloud is positively impacting revenue but has challenges

The research also shows that organizations will allocate almost one-third (32%) of their total IT budget to cloud computing, with the total average spend being $78M over the next 12 months, up from $73M in 2020.

The top business objectives driving cloud investments are:

• Enabling disaster recovery and business continuity (40%).
• Replacing on-premise legacy technology (39%).
• Lowering the total cost of ownership (34%).
• Improving employee productivity (33%) and greater flexibility to react to changing market conditions (32%).      

However, the adoption of emerging technologies like the cloud comes with challenges. When asked what ITDMs needed most from their future or current cloud providers, leading the list is security expertise (41%), followed by better cloud management capabilities (40%) and cost management capabilities (38%).

As more organizations move toward fully being in the cloud, security teams will need the proper talent and resources to manage their cloud infrastructure and overcome the security and privacy hurdles that come with the cloud. 

To see the whole Cloud Computing study, please view the executive summary.