Elly Yates-Roberts |
Public cloud is driving digital innovation. As IT organisations around the world continue to radically transform their infrastructures, evolve the way services are provided, and deal with security issues, cloud use and dependence continue to grow. In addition to day-to-day operations, for many businesses, public cloud is now seen as a prerequisite for innovation-driven growth.
To capture current attitudes and opinions about public cloud, access constraints, security concerns, emerging solutions, and a variety of related topics, Barracuda commissioned independent market researcher Censuswide to survey IT decision makers in the United States, Germany, France, and the UK. The results of that research were published in the 'Cloud networks: Shifting into hyperdrive' report.
The survey includes responses from 800 executives, individual contributors, and team managers with responsibility for their organisation’s cloud infrastructure. They came from organisations of all sizes in EMEA and the US, across a broad range of industries, including construction, education, finance, healthcare, technology, manufacturing, retail, transportation, and others.
The report uncovers some interesting perspectives on the evolving cloud landscape. IT professionals are gaining confidence in the cloud, with more than three-quarters of respondents using multiple cloud providers. Nearly 80 per cent of these respondents also say that their organisation has deployed an Azure-based network.
However, organisations face growing constraints when it comes to cloud access. 56 per cent of respondents are struggling to ensure seamless availability and ‘always-on’ access to cloud applications for their organisations, and nearly 70 per cent experience latency and performance issues running software as a service workloads, such as Office 365.
At the same time, current network infrastructure is growing increasingly costly. More than 70 per cent of respondents are using traditional access methods, such as multi-protocol label switching (MPLS), in their organisation’s network. More than 60 per cent further said that their MPLS costs increase heavily due to seasonal workload peaks.
As a result, IT professionals are looking for easier and more economical connectivity while still maintaining security in their cloud networks. More than 70 per cent indicated that they have plans to implement an SD-WAN solution in the next 12 months to address cloud-connectivity issues. Many companies are dealing with aging infrastructures, making SD-WAN a logical choice to alleviate performance and cost constraints inherent in those older architectures. By deploying a natively built, all-in-one solution that combines security and network optimisation to create a secure SD-WAN framework, organisations can reap the full benefits of public cloud.
Klaus Gheri is vice president of network security for Barracuda
This article was originally published in the Spring 2021 issue of The Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.