The Intel Cloud Security Report of 2017 has brought out some interesting revelations about the cloud industry, and the likely attitudes and expectations this year. Titled Building Trust in a Cloudy Sky, this report features responses from more than 2,000 IT professionals to know about their insights into the current happenings of the cloud industry, and the possible challenges they believe would hamper its growth in the near future.

Out of these 2000 professionals, about 45.6 percent opined that the rate of cloud adoption has slowed down because of the non-availability of cloud “specialists.” In other words, the gap in cloud skills is impeding the adoption of cloud within their respective organizations, thereby casting a shadow in IT deployments. Surprisingly, 15 percent of the respondents opined that lack of security skills has not affected their organization at all, and in fact, no such problem even exists.

Another significant take away from this report is the role of IT department in cloud deployments. As much as 40 percent of cloud services used by organizations are deployed without the knowledge of their IT department. This finding opens up a multitude of problems. Firstly, lack of transparency can lead to  a disjointed security environment that can put the entire organization at risk. Secondly, such a disjointed environment means more work for the security department as they have to identify loopholes and address them, after they occur.

Thirdly, when an organization doesn’t have a comprehensive or a company-wide policy, it creates a lot of chaos. Such a scenario can encourage different departments to commission their own services and deployments, which could be a nightmare for any organization.

Due to the above problems, it’s best to involve the IT department in any deployment. Even if they’re not actively involved in every stage of deployment, they should at the minimum have sufficient visibility to ensure that all applications and data are safe and secure.

The Intel Cloud Security Report also highlights some positive developments for the cloud industry. For example, the number of respondents who distrust public cloud services has fallen from 50 percent to 29 percent over the last year. In addition, 85 percent of the respondents said they store some or all of their critical applications and data in the cloud.

This is a heartening development, and goes to show how much cloud security has advanced over the last year. These advancements have softened people’s attitude towards public cloud, and in turn, this is expected to increase the rate of cloud adoption.

When the respondents were questioned about their use of PaaS, SaaS and IaaS, their responses showed that an overwhelming majority preferred a hybrid cloud model to store their data. Also, 57 percent of organizations have been involved in some form of hybrid cloud deployment, up from the 19 percent of last year.

Predictably, the number of organizations using private cloud has fallen from 50 percent last year to 25 percent this year.

All this means, we can expect more cloud adoption this year. In fact, we can expect more hybrid cloud and public cloud deployments as organizations feel more confident about cloud security.

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