KPMG Study: Data Loss, Privacy Risk Biggest Obstacles To Cloud
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
A recent KPMG report, Elevating Business in the Cloud, has found increased use of cloud technology by businesses around the globe in order to better connect with their employees and customers. The report summarizes the results of the firm’s 2014 Cloud Survey and interviews with more than 500 global executives across financial services, retail, healthcare, media, and pharmaceuticals.
The survey found data loss and privacy risk remain the most significant obstacle to cloud adoption at 53 percent, followed by the risk of intellectual property theft at 50 percent. When compared to the 2012 study results, the findings suggest that over time, security has become less of a challenge and cloud adopters may feel they’re better prepared now to secure their data, as well as manage data breaches when they do occur.
“While the challenge posed by cloud related data loss and privacy threats are less pronounced in the minds of global industry leaders, they are still taking the issue seriously,” Rick Wright, principal and global cloud enablement leader at KPMG, stated in a release. “The clear trend in the data that we have collected shows that, even in the face of significant media attention paid to recent data breaches, global leaders are still willing to embrace the transformative potential of the cloud.”
The study revealed the primary function of cloud remains driving cost efficiencies (49 percent), but it also demonstrated that increasingly organizations are adopting cloud technology as transformative forces in order to affect large-scale change either within business units or across the entire enterprise. New uses include better enabling a flexible and mobile workforce (42 percent) as well as creating better alignment and interaction with customers, suppliers, and business partners (37 percent). Other uses include leveraging data more effectively to provide insights (35 percent), new product development and innovation (32 percent), developing new business models (30 percent), transitioning to a global shared services model (28 percent), and increase speed of product to market (28 percent).
The study also found that business analytics play a pivotal role in 35 percent of enterprises currently adopting cloud computing technology, and 73 percent of those polled experienced improved business performance as a result of implementing cloud-based applications and strategies.
“It’s just becoming a rare instance when we’re seeing companies spend capital on servers and data center infrastructure,” Kevin Surovcik, a managing director and IT adviser at Grant Thornton, told CFO. Cloud adoption is “approaching 100 percent in the upstart world, when a company is building a product or service that will be reliant on technology infrastructure. They’re using Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service models.”