News | June 28, 2012

Survey Reveals User Attitudes, Critiques Of Cloud Storage Including Benefits And Barriers

More organizations plan to implement cloud storage than any other cloud initiative

Natick, MA – A recent survey revealed user attitudes and adoption plans for cloud storage; full results are available at http://bit.ly/cs-survey-2012results .

  • Nearly three-quarters of cloud storage users estimated they could recover their data within 24 hours
  • One out of every eight organizations that do not use cloud storage responded that it would take “more than a week” to recover their data

Respondents were attendees at the recent Cloud Computing Expo at Javits Center in New York June 11-14, an audience expected to offer more sophisticated insight into the use of cloud computing than a general IT audience. Seventy-three percent of respondents have implemented some form of cloud computing already, with more than a quarter (28 percent) having done so for three or more years.

Of the respondents, more people have implemented or plan to implement cloud storage than any other cloud computing initiative, including software-as-a-service.

Among other desirable benefits, more than a third of respondents indicated they value off-site data protection for disaster recovery (40 percent), easier access to backup/archive (37 percent) and the comparative affordability of cloud storage over hardware (35 percent).

Nearly three-quarters of cloud storage users estimated they could recover their data within 24 hours (72 percent), a 10-point difference from non-cloud-storage users (62 percent). In contrast, more than one in eight organizations that do not use cloud storage responded that it would take “more than a week” to recover their data in the event of a disaster, whereas only three percent of cloud storage users said the same. Nearly 57 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, “It seems like we are always running out of storage.”

The greatest adoption of cloud computing thus far is in small organizations (between 51-250 employees) and large enterprises (more than 5000 employees). Half of respondents representing organizations with 51-250 employees say they have implemented some form of cloud computing for three years or more, and 35 percent of organizations with 5000 or more employees. Smaller organizations are turning to cloud computing as an easier to manage, lower cost alternative to traditional computing, while global enterprises often seek the accessibility of cloud computing as they seek to support a geographically dispersed workforce.

The survey was sponsored by TwinStrata, Inc., the leading innovator of cloud-based data storage, backup and disaster recovery solutions. Interested parties can take the survey for themselves at: http://svy.mk/2012-cs-survey

About TwinStrata, Inc.
TwinStrata is an innovator in enterprise-class data storage, data protection and disaster recovery/business continuity solutions using cloud storage. With TwinStrata CloudArray®, companies of all sizes can simply and economically leverage the scalability and efficiency of cloud storage while maintaining the availability, performance and security of local storage. CloudArray software and hardware solutions support all file and operating systems, and deliver substantial advantages over traditional off-site storage solutions, including a pay-as-you-go model, unlimited elastic capacity, local performance, in-cloud snapshots and disaster recovery, dynamic caching, automated policies, AES256 encryption, and continuous access to data.

SOURCE: TwinStrata, Inc.