Enterprises and small and medium businesses (SMBs) are experiencing escalating costs tied to rogue cloud use, complex backup and recovery, and inefficient cloud storage, according to Symantec Corp's recent Avoiding the Hidden Costs of Cloud 2013 Survey.
Rogue clouds are defined as business groups implementing public cloud applications that are not managed by or integrated into the company's IT infrastructure.
Industry expertspredict several key issues will arise in 2013 focused on the financial pressures and security challenges of cloud computing. For instance, business continuity is seen as an important issue with the increase in cloud outages posing greater risks than security breaches.
Outages impact businesses and pose important concerns around data loss prevention, backup, time spent on data recovery and the associated costs. However, with preparation, organizations canbuild safe, agile and efficient clouds that willenable them to meet their business goals.
Symantec's survey estimated that 95% of organizations in Singapore are at least discussing cloud, up from 73% a year ago.
Rogue cloud deployments are one of the cost pitfalls. It is a surprisingly common problem, found in more than three quarters (85%) of businesses within the last year. Globally, it also seems to be an issue experienced more by enterprises (83%), due to their larger company size, than SMBs (70%).
Among organizations that reported rogue cloud issues, 31% experienced theexposure of confidential information, and more than a third (36%) faced account takeover issues. The most commonly cited reasons for undertaking rogue cloud projects were to save time and money.