94% of IT decision makers express concerns about moving data to the cloud

The vast majority (94%) of IT decision makers report having concerns about moving data to the cloud, despite the increasing shift to software as a service (SaaS) usage.

Concerns include data privacy, the cost of maintenance, the cost of migration, compliance with data protection regulations, and complicated infrastructure, according to the 2018 Enterprise Cloud Trends report.

The most common concerns about the move to the cloud are:

• 61%, data privacy
• 41%, cost of maintenance
• 35%, cost of migration

Respondents reported that their organizations spend 26% of their IT budget on cloud services. Although many respondents (83%) believe their IT department can support the security changes to support a cloud-based system, a greater number (91%) believe their organizations’ security policies need to improve to fully operate.

In fact, the majority (73%) of respondents reported that their organizations’ data is more secure when kept on local hardware. Reasons for concern in SaaS implementation include that SaaS solutions store data on shared servers (66%), may not integrate with existing infrastructure (42%), and/or security is not a priority for SaaS (27%).

While SaaS usage is predicted to increase from 22% to 28% of applications on average in the next 12 months, the majority of respondents believe organization security policies will need to improve to support the transition.