Study: Security Remains a Barrier to Cloud Migrations -- Virtualization Review

The Cloud Report

Study: Security Remains a Barrier to Cloud Migrations

Some of the largest enterprises are moving from monolithic datacenter architectures to private and hybrid clouds, according to the third-annual Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) membership survey (.PDF).

More than half of the ODCA's members (52 percent) are actively shifting their application development plans with cloud architectures, and are already running a significant portion of their operations in private clouds.

Meanwhile, security remains the leading inhibitor to cloud adoption, according to this year's report. Security was a key barrier two years ago, when the ODCA presented the findings from its first membership survey at a one-day conference in New York. Regulatory issues and fear of vendor lock-in, coupled with a dearth of open solutions and lack of confidence in the reliability of cloud services, were other inhibitors.

While only 124 ODCA members participated in the survey, the membership consists of blue-chip global organizations, including BMW, Deutsche Bank, Disney, Lockheed Martin, Marriott, UBS and Verizon. While Intel serves as a technical advisor, the group is not run or sponsored by equipment suppliers or service providers (though some of them have joined as user members), meaning the users set the organization's agenda.

One quarter of respondents said 40 to 60 percent of their operations are now run in an internal cloud, up from 10 percent of respondents last year. Meanwhile, 26 percent of respondents said 20 to 39 percent of their operations have moved to internal clouds, up from 17 percent.

By 2016, 38 percent of the overall respondents expect more than 60 percent of their operations to run in private clouds, up from 18 percent last year. As for public cloud adoption, most respondents (79 percent) said about 20 percent of their operations now run using external services. That's about the same as last year (81 percent), though that survey had half of this year's respondents.

Only 3 percent envision running everything in the public cloud, and 5 percent see running 40 to 60 percent of their operations using a public cloud provider. Thirteen percent forecast that 20 to 39 percent of their operations will run in the public cloud.

Among the most popular cloud service types are:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): 86 percent
Service orchestration: 49 percent
Virtual machine (VM) interoperability: 48 percent
Service catalog: 39 percent
Scale-out storage: 39 percent
Information as a Service: 29 percent

All of the members will use the ODCA's cloud usage models in their procurement processes, the survey showed. Among those technologies from the usage model valued include (in order):