Growing Interest in Cloud Storage Amid Security and Reliability Concerns

CommVault customers stress security/privacy as the overarching concern of moving to a cloud storage model according to a recent CommVault survey, which polled its customers worldwide to assess interest in cloud storage services as well as identify top concerns and considerations.

The survey garnered 535 responses from companies of all sizes, with half of the responses representing enterprises with more than 1,000 employees. Nearly 60 percent of respondents manage between 6-75 TBs of data across a variety of small, medium and large-sized enterprises, reinforcing a growing trend among organizations of all sizes that they are seriously examining the key benefits of leveraging cloud storage services.

According to the survey, 52 percent of respondents are considering the use of cloud storage services now or in the future. More respondents cited growing data volumes as the No. 1 reason to evaluate cloud services, followed by storage capacity limits, large data center footprints, lengthy retention requirements and costly storage infrastructures.

CommVault’s latest customer survey underscores the company’s ongoing commitment to understanding the impact of ever-increasing data management requirements while ensuring that continual Simpana software enhancements are designed specifically to solve customers’ toughest business problems.

Customers Cite Key Benefits & Top Concerns
of Leveraging Cloud Storage Services

• In order of importance, 33 percent of those polled ranked offsite disaster recovery as the top overarching benefit of moving to cloud storage.
• Other potential advantages cited by the survey respondents include the ability to replace or supplement tape, as well as the opportunities to leverage flexible pricing models, lower overall costs due to decreased hardware capital expenses, decrease data center storage footprints and increase storage capacities.
• More than 75 percent of those surveyed expressed qualms about moving to a cloud storage model. Security/privacy was the number one concern as cited by 30 percent of survey participants that ranked security as their number one concern.
• While the industry continues to flag concerns about the cost of managing IT and on-premises storage (which also can be significantly reduced by moving data to the cloud), only 17% of respondents ranked the cost of deploying cloud services as their first concern. Reliability was a greater concern than cost and was rated as the number one concern by 20 percent of those surveyed; scalability ranked a close fourth overall to cost.

Setting Expectations
Customers Prepare for Cloud Storage

• According to CommVault’s cloud survey, 43 percent of those responding expect to store between 6-75 TBs of data in the cloud while nearly 60 percent already manage in-house that same amount of primary data on a regular basis. Also, nearly half of the survey participants move between 6-75 TBs of storage to tape on a monthly basis for offsite vaulting.
• Once data is moved to the cloud, nearly a quarter of the respondents (24%) plan to retain it for more than six years, with eight percent of respondents expecting to keep data for more than ten years.
• For customers planning to use the cloud, 31 percent expect to dedicate between 1.6 and 30 Mb/s of network bandwidth exclusively to accessing cloud storage while 15 percent project dedicating between 31 and 130 Mb/s of bandwidth.

"CommVault continually surveys its global customer base to maintain an in-depth understanding of how we can help drive their business success and alleviate data management challenges," said David West, vice president of marketing and business development for CommVault. "From our latest survey, we know that many of our customers are considering cloud storage to keep pace with rapid data growth and reduce internal IT costs. Still, they’re worried about security, complexity and reliability, especially since protecting their mission-critical data remains of paramount importance. To that end, CommVault is working diligently to ease their concerns and ensure that customers will be able to reap the maximum benefits of sound, secure and seamless cloud storage strategies."

Conducted in December 2009, the CommVault Cloud Survey polled 10,411 CommVault customers worldwide in a 12-question online survey to gauge their views on cloud computing and storage.