This week, Flexera released its annual state of the cloud report. One of the key take-aways is that things had been shifting quickly, even before the pandemic forced many companies to adopt the cloud much faster than they might have been planning to.
If you still think this cloud thing is coming sometime down the road, you need to think again. Especially considering that 750 global respondents to the Flexera state of the cloud survey said that 50 percent of workloads will be in the public cloud in the next 12 months.
As you might expect, the pandemic has only accelerated this move. The company added a COVID-19 question after the original survey went out, and of those who responded, 59 percent expected their cloud spend to exceed what they had planned before the pandemic reared its head.
It doesn’t take a huge amount of research to figure out why people are moving to the cloud faster than expected. As many organizations have sent employees home to work, even cloud laggards have had to adjust. When you multiply that by millions of employees, spending is bound to increase beyond budgeted expectations.
That increased usage has created a slew of concerns among IT pros charged with keeping their companies secure. I’m betting you share some of these concerns if you are an MSP running IT on behalf of your clients.
A deeper look at the issues
As you might expect, with more employees working from home in the cloud, security and governance have become a huge issue for IT pros and the data from the Flexera survey bears that out.
In fact, the report found that a full 81 percent reported cloud security was a huge concern, followed closely by 77 percent who were concerned about cloud governance. One additional issue is finding ways to control cloud spending (something we wrote about recently) with 79 percent worried about that.
The good news is that there are tools to help with these problems. A slew of startups and established companies are working on cloud security and governance (including Barracuda Networks). As the cloud security problem becomes more apparent, security companies will be looking for ways to help customers with these issues.
The report was also rich and full of data about the cloud landscape, and this post only scratches the surface, but you can have a look for yourself if you want to learn more.
For now, just know that you share a common set of issues and concerns with your colleagues across IT, and once you identify those problems with your clients, you can begin to look at solutions to help them solve them.
Photo: Blackboard / Shutterstock
