News

Survey Says Despite Security Concerns, Enterprise Cloud Adoption Still To Grow in 2019

• By Wendy A. Hernandez
• 01/17/2019

Microsoft technology partner NetEnrich Inc., which specializes in the deployment, migration and management of application workloads on Microsoft Azure, announced the results of its 2019 Cloud Adoption survey, which show that cloud adoption is not only very high, but will most likely continue to grow.

With 100 decision makers at companies with 500 or more employees responding to the online December 2018 survey, 68 percent said they're using cloud infrastructure today while 27 percent reported that their companies have plans to do so in the future. For those using cloud infrastructure now, it appears nearly half (47 percent) are implementing public cloud extensively in production, with 38 percent using it moderately in their production environments. These numbers may not surprise anyone, given the onslaught of cloud offerings that promise to help cut costs and streamline systems for both enterprises and small businesses.

Also not surprising is the importance of security -- which came out as the top priority for 2019 (72 percent) and top concern for moving to the public cloud (33 percent). According the announcement, "These data points reflect the growing challenge of how to protect company, employee, customer and product information, while simultaneously accessing the innovation, cost and efficiency benefits that come with moving more infrastructure and applications to the cloud."

One of the more eye-opening statistics from the survey was the amount of tech funding -- 20 percent to 40 percent -- being spent on Shadow IT, according to 56 percent of the respondents, especially with security being the top concern and focus going into the new year.

More key take aways from the survey, according to the announcement, include:

Cloud Will Save You Money, but Don't Lose Sight of Spend: IT decision makers said security risks (68 percent) were the biggest concern with regard to the future of their IT organizations, but IT spend and cost overruns were a close second (59 percent). Another cost-related concern: talent. IT pros said the cost of finding and hiring skilled staff (48 percent) was their top cost concern.

Driving Business Outcomes Trumps Tech Management on List of IT Priorities: Nearly one-third (32 percent) of IT decision makers said that a commitment to driving successful end-to-end customer engagement was IT's most important job, followed by demonstrated experience deploying and integrating software (27 percent) and dedicated support (23 percent).

To download the complete NetEnrich 2019 Cloud Adoption survey results, go here.