6 Revealing Cloud Storage Statistics

The Value Of Cloud Storage

Businesses are quickly moving to cloud-based storage, according to a recent study of 100 executives by NAS vendor Avere Systems and Gatepoint Research.

The executives, at the manager level or above, also indicated what they see as the key benefits of using the cloud and which applications they intend to deploy.

Continue on to learn more about the cloud storage landscape.

1. Public, Private Cloud Usage Grows

Businesses are using public and private clouds in almost equal measure, at 37 percent and 35 percent, respectively, the executives said.

Surprisingly, only 7 percent of those polled said their companies are using both public and private clouds, so-called hybrid clouds. As more cloud providers create new techniques for hybrid clouds, this figure should rise.

2. Disaster Recovery Key Benefit Of Public Cloud Storage

As the key benefits of storage in a public cloud, executives gave the highest ratings to disaster recovery (63 percent), centralizing data management (51 percent), and cost savings (44 percent).

Viewed as slightly less important benefits were virtualized storage resources (35 percent), elimination of storage silos (33 percent) and cost savings (32 percent).

3. Executives Like Operational Benefits Of The Public Cloud

When it comes to putting business value on using the cloud, the executives rated scalability, business flexibility and managing data growth as having the highest importance.

This is somewhat surprising, as the values rated lower by the executives -- reduced costs, data center consolidation and reduced IT staffing -- are usually cited as cloud benefits.

4. On-Demand Computing, Storage, Applications Will Be Popular Cloud Uses

Executives polled said they plan to use on-demand compute/processing (35 percent), storage (30 percent) and applications (28 percent) as cloud services.

These services are already being used by a high percentage of executives polled.

5. Public Cloud Usage Will Grow

Many executives are gaining confidence in the public cloud and plan to move their IT resources to it in the next five years.

Forty-five percent of respondents said they plan to access public clouds in five years, while 29 percent will use private clouds and 22 percent will use hybrid clouds.

6. Biggest Worry Of Cloud Storage is Security

Security, followed by the latency of WANs and data retention policies, are the top worries of executives about storing data in public clouds.

While the cloud remains a relatively new computing model, security remains is the top concern about virtually all cloud use.