As the cloud has grown, a number of concerns have emerged about its overall security and safety and these concerns have been held up as reasons that more SMBs don’t make the switch to running mission-critical applications on virtual servers. A recent survey of 1473 SMBs and large professional companies, however, showed that while only 44 percent considered the cloud to be a viable source of backup recovery, 72 percent were using the cloud to run their mission-critical applications. Despite valid security concerns, the survey indicated that many companies were making the switch to a cloud-based environment. Why?
According to the survey, it was the combination of downtime and cost on their current virtual or physical providers that prompted a switch to a cloud environment. While 54 percent of those surveyed did not know the hourly cost of their downtime (a problem in and of itself), 16 percent stated it would be more than $10,000 per hour and 7 percent said it would be between $5,000 and $10,000 per hour. Add to this the fact that 32 percent of respondents had at least one incident of downtime in the last year that resulted in an inability to connect to their mission-critical apps, and it’s no wonder that companies are choosing a move to the cloud.
Even with security and storage issues still being resolved, companies are seeing the value in a service that can not only host their mission-critical applications, but that can scale with their needs and offer virtually unlimited uptime. While the cloud still has a number of problems to solve, the previous hurdle of security seems to have been trumped by concerns about uptime and cost from non-cloud providers.
Related News:
