Security Still Biggest Cloud Storage Concern For Business Execs

Security is still the number one concern among senior business executives when it comes to storing data in the cloud, despite adoption continuing to accelerate across industries.

According to a survey carried out by big data and analytics firm Teradata, more than half of business-critical data is likely to reside in the cloud by 2019, but 80 percent of executives still cite security as the biggest deterrent.

However, these worries will not stop the acceleration of cloud adoption. Fifty-six percent pf IT data is predicted to reside in the cloud by 2019, followed by customer (53 percent) and financial data (51 percent).

Cloud concerns

In terms of specific reasons that are holding back the storage of critical data in the cloud, 40 percent of respondents said general security is a risk, while 25 percent believed cloud data adoption will result in more security breaches.

“Our message to organisations around the world is that the cloud is actually one of the most secure means of virtual storage available,” said Marc Clark, director of cloud strategy and deployment at Teradata. “While our study finds widespread concerns, the fact is that cloud storage is growing rapidly, remains hugely cost-effective, and that there are ways to manage it securely.

“Cloud computing security processes should be designed to address the security controls that the cloud provider will incorporate, in order to maintain the data security, privacy and compliance with necessary regulations, as well as providing a business continuity and data backup plan.”

When it comes to different industries, healthcare and telecoms are two sectors making big moves. 59 percent of respondents highlighted the healthcare industry as one that will significantly increase adoption over the next two years and 48 percent of telecoms organisations anticipate a significant increase in their cloud storage use by 2019.

Teradata news

Along with the above survey, Teradata has made multiple product announcements at its Universe 2017 event currently taking place in Nice, France.

The first is a flexible database license model across hybrid cloud deployments, providing portability for deployment flexibility, subscription-based licenses and simplified tiers with bundled features. In a nutshell it means that customers will have the flexibility to choose, shift, expand, and restructure their hybrid cloud environment by moving licenses between deployment options.

John Dinning,  Chief Business Officer at Teradata said: “Not only is the database license portable across the hybrid cloud options, but so are workloads, enabled by a common code base in all deployments. This flexibility is a first in our industry and means that data models, applications, and development efforts can be migrated or transferred unchanged across any ecosystem.”

The second announcement is an updated customer journey platform that will give marketers easier access to customer path analytics, dynamic communication journey visualisations, machine learning and predictive simulations to provide customer insights.

Marketers will be able to use the data collected from both online and offline sources to increase response rates and reduce churn. Importantly, it will also enable greater personalisation, something which customers have come to expect in today’s omni-channel world.

“In this release of Customer Journey we are putting more analytics into the hands of marketing, so they can build a deeper understanding of customer experiences and then proactively optimise related journeys,” said Dan Harrington, head Teradata’s Consulting & Support Services.

Finally, there was the launch of an all-memory updated to Teradata’s Intelliflex platform, which moves completely to a solid state drive (SSD) to deliver increases in performance, storage density and energy efficiency.

“By transitioning to all SSDs we now provide an all-memory appliance capable of delivering up to seven times the compute power per cabinet of our previous product – plus rapid performance elasticity that is simply unmatched in our market,” said Oliver Ratzesberger, EVP and chief product officer at Teradata.

“We are providing our customers with more performance, more storage, and more memory in the same footprint, and at half the energy consumed per unit of performance delivered.”

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