Posted on October 28, 2021
Cloud
NETdepot have found that 37% (over a third) of business owners do not use cloud services as they are not comfortable putting private information on it.
In 2021 this is higher than the expected number given how much data is relied upon to have effective business continuity.
In our new largely remote business environment, who trusts which cloud services and how many cloud services are currently benefiting organizations as a whole are statistics we’d like to know about.
NETdepot conducted consumer research of 250 small business owners (10-250 employees) that cross sectioned age, location and gender to find out if they use cloud services, if it has supported them with remote working and if they trust private information on them.
Private cloud, otherwise known as internal or corporate cloud, is a cloud computing environment with all resources (hardware and software) assigned to a single customer. This means that no one outside the organization can access the exclusive cloud. Benefits of a private cloud include reduced costs and enhanced security.
28% of small business owners in the US choose to use a private cloud to store their information and 38% of these owners are based in the south-east region.
Public cloud is a version of cloud computing where a service provider gives access to resources to the public. These resources can be reached by multiple organizations via the internet. The public cloud has benefits such as resource sharing and scalability. For example, Gmail is a public cloud.
NETdepot found that 31% of business owners in the US use public cloud, 36% of these users are in the north-east region.
20% of business owners in the US use a hybrid cloud.
A hybrid cloud is a mix of both private and public clouds. Organizations choose this because you can combine services which enable communication between the specific service options. The predominant benefit is greater flexibility as workloads can be seamlessly moved between cloud solutions as required.
Remote working has become the world’s new normal over the last two years, which has meant that our reliance on connection online has escalated to a priority status for most businesses.
As home working has seen such a surge, NETdepot decided to investigate exactly how many businesses using cloud computing think that it made remote working easier. A staggering 75% agreed that cloud services made remote working easier for their business and 80% of business owners aged between 41 and 50 strongly agreed with this conclusion.
With such a massive adaptation for so many businesses it’s no surprise that there was a spike of businesses leaning towards cloud services in 2020 and 2021.
Of the businesses that use cloud services 77% trust that their information is secure. NETdepot found that 87% of 18-30 year old business owners trust that their private information is safe across cloud services.
The highest number of untrusting business owners were in the south-west region of the US with 47% of owners across Arkansas, Arizona, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas not trusting cloud services to protect their information.
The most common reason for business owners not trusting cloud services is that they don’t believe their private information will be secure. The truth however is that data stored within cloud services may be safer than it is stored in your hard drive. This is because the security measures installed by the larger companies providing cloud services will have much more secure protections in place than your office computers. Hackers are notorious for using malware and phishing emails to access the data on your devices which could disable your business permanently.
Cloud servers are usually located in data centers that are physically and virtually patrolled via encryption.
Other enhanced security measures include the consistent security updates. Cloud services are monitored 24/7 which means that the latest security updates are always in place.
Another security protocol is firewalls that are built in to act as a barrier against unauthorized or suspicious traffic attempting access.
Cloud services are also looking to artificial intelligence (AI) to incorporate built in algorithms to identify any plausible vulnerabilities.
Disasters happen and power outages are among the most damaging for small businesses that rely on their data to run. Cloud services implement redundancy plans that ensure your data can be accessed regardless of whether a server goes down because there are always back ups in place. Third-party security testing is carried out by cloud providers to identify any gaps in their security protocols and enhance their defence systems.
Without using one of the three cloud services your business could be missing out on levels of protection that comes along with using either the private cloud, the public cloud or a hybrid approach. Given that our world is so remote based, cloud services provide a level of security that supersedes security that can be implemented in house.
Over a third of business owners do not use cloud services as they are not comfortable putting private information on it and yet it proves to be the most secure option for businesses and customers with the enhanced security measures, methodical back up and reliable tests for vulnerabilities.
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The research was carried out by OnePoll between 20.09.2021 – 24.09.2021 of 250 business owners (with 10-250 employees) in the US.