Bengaluru: Intel’s second annual cloud security report holds both good and bad news for the channel partners selling public cloud services.
On a positive note for the resellers, Intel Security sees that respondents show an inclination and trust public cloud services and are overwhelmingly adopting it and moving away from purely on-premises IT. They even expects 80 percent of their IT budgets to be spent on cloud within an average time of just 15 months.
“Twenty-five percent of respondents have all their sensitive corporate data in the cloud,” Raj Samani, Intel Security’s EMEA chief technology officer. “We’re really seeing a fundamental shift in how the cloud is perceived, the level of trust, and what they believe the benefits will be” reports, Channel Partners.
However, what does not paint a bright picture for the channel is that almost 40 percent of cloud services are now commissioned without the involvement of IT. This will harm the partners that engage mainly with technology rather than line-of-business leaders. [Read the full report here]
This global survey, titled “Building Trust in a Cloudy Sky,” is based on responses from 1,400 senior technical professionals directly involved in decision-making for cloud security initiatives and/or working for companies that use cloud services. 36 percent of respondents based in North America and 27 percent in Europe. Most are in organizations with between 1,001 and 5,000 employees; an additional 28 percent have 501 to 1,000 workers.
Samani says an ongoing shortage of skilled security professionals is holding back cloud efforts and that, for partners, there’s a clear need for services around the security aspects of migrating data to cloud — no matter what line-of-business leads think. “We have an industry that believes the fact you’re using a third-party provider means you don’t need as many security skills,” he says.
“Actually, it’s the complete opposite. The lack of skills has slowed adoption,” the report states.
The adoption of hybrid cloud among respondents has increased from 19 percent to 57 percent, and on average.
The report clearly indicates that the Indian IT Channel fraternity, being one of the prominent players in Cloud, need to gear up to this situation to reap maximum benefits. The public cloud market in India is currently valued at $1.1 billion and is expected to grow to $3.9 billion by 2020 and cloud spending in India will exceed $10 billion by 2020, says a Zinnov report. It is this opportunity that is driving digital transformation across enterprises, vendors and channel partners going ahead.