More Indian firms look at Cloud for data security: Study

At a time when data security has become a key concern for Indian firms, 86 per cent of organisations see their IT budget increasing over the next three years, a new study said on Wednesday.

Nearly 80 per cent of businesses are willing to invest time, money and skills on cloud services and currently the adoption of the public cloud is high compared to that of private/hybrid cloud, said the report released by the cloud and virtualisation software services provider VMware.

"With nearly 25 per cent of all IT workloads being managed in the cloud today and the number expected to double by 2021, it is evident that the traditional on-premises IT environment is undergoing a profound change," said Arun Parameswaran, Managing Director, VMware India.

The study, conducted by market research firm Kantar IMRB for VMWare, found that only basic data such as emails, messaging services and customer relationship management (CRM) are stored on the public cloud owing to data security concerns.

"Very large enterprises (80 per cent), large enterprises (83 per cent) and medium enterprises (82 per cent) are likely to invest in private cloud. Likewise, a high majority of them are also keen to invest in public and hybrid cloud," the findings showed.

The study also found that 87 per cent of respondents in the IT/ ITeS/ Telecom sector, 55 per cent in the manufacturing sector, 64 per cent in banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector, 53 per cent in government/public sector/defence and 65 per cent from other services agree IT security is among the top business priorities.

"Today, CIOs play an extremely essential role in their organisation's IT and it is of utmost importance to have enterprise data available always -- anytime and anywhere while tightly secured," Parameswaran added.

The respondents from the government (70 per cent) and BFSI (67 per cent) said that budget for security should increase by 25 per cent over the next year.

--IANS

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