Are you also a victim of 'rogue cloud'?

BANGALORE, INDIA: Indian organizations are widely migrating to the cloud to gain competitive advantages around speed, agility and flexibility, according to Symantec Corp's, 'Avoiding the Hidden Costs of Cloud 2013' survey.

In fact, nearly all the surveyed large and small businesses in the country are at least discussing cloud. However, increasing complexity and the proliferation of 'rogue clouds' - prevalent in about 90 per cent of Indian businesses, according to the survey - is resulting in escalating costs related to cloud.

Rogue clouds are defined as business groups implementing public cloud applications that are not managed by or integrated into the company's IT infrastructure. Other key survey findings showed enterprises and SMBs are experiencing escalating costs tied to complex back-up and recovery, and inefficient cloud storage.

"For Indian businesses cloud computing means reduced CapEx, more predictable OpEx, easier management, enhanced scalability and better disaster preparedness " said Anand Naik, MD, sales, India & SAARC, Symantec. "However, in a rush to implement cloud, a majority of organizations in India are unwarily incurring hidden costs which can be avoided by taking control of cloud deployments while also minimizing the data control and security risks linked with rogue cloud use."

Rogue Cloud Implementations

According to the survey, rogue cloud deployments are one of the cost pitfalls. It is a surprisingly common problem, found in 89 per cent of Indian enterprises and 92 per cent of Indian SMBs within the last year.

Among Indian enterprises who reported rogue cloud issues, 57 per cent experienced the exposure of confidential information, and more than a third faced account takeover issues, defacement of Web properties, or stolen goods or services. The survey found that top rogue cloud issues for Indian SMBs include security, data protection and loss of confidential information.

The challenge is escalating, with nearly half (48 per cent) of Indian SMBs indicating that rogue cloud deployments are becoming more frequent.

The most commonly cited reasons by Indian businesses for undertaking rogue cloud projects were to save time and money.

Cloud Backup and Recovery Issues

Cloud is complicating back-up and recovery. First, most Indian organizations use three or more solutions to back-up their physical, virtual and cloud data - leading to increased IT inefficiencies, risk and training costs. Furthermore, nearly two-thirds organizations have lost cloud data (60 per cent of enterprises and 70 per cent of SMBs), and most (80 per cent) have experienced recovery failures.

Finally, most see cloud recovery as a slow, tedious process; 85 per cent estimate it would take three or more days to recover from a catastrophic loss of data in the cloud.

Inefficient Cloud Storage

Theoretically, cloud storage has the advantages of being quick to deploy, paying for only what is used and offering easy adjustment of capacity, all of which provide for high storage utilization rates. In practice, however, global cloud storage utilization is actually extremely low at just 17 per cent. It is even worse for SMBs, at just seven per cent. This is resulting in organizations paying for six times as much storage as they need.

The problem is exacerbated because almost half of enterprises in India (48 per cent) admit that little to none of their data is deduplicated, and 34 per cent of SMBs indicate that half or more of their data is duplicate, all of which is leading organizations to pay for storage they do not require.

Compliance and eDiscovery Concerns

With growing regulatory and internal compliance frameworks, the survey revealed that two-thirds of Indian enterprises are concerned about not only meeting compliance requirements, but also proving it. However, nearly half (47 per cent) have been fined for privacy violations in the cloud within the past 12 months. Organizations are performing equally poorly on the eDiscovery front: three-quarters of those who have received requests (76 per cent) missed deadlines for delivering the requested information, potentially leading to fines or compromised legal positions. What is worse, 34 per cent never found the requested information.

Data in Transit Issues

Organizations have all sorts of assets in the cloud - such as web properties, online businesses or web applications - that require SSL certificates to protect the data in transit whether it is personal or financial information, business transactions and other online interactions. The survey showed companies found managing many SSL certificates to be highly complex: Just 48 per cent rate cloud SSL certificate management as easy and only 40 per cent are certain their cloud-partner's certificates are in compliance with corporate standards.

Hidden Costs Are Easily Avoided

The survey shows ignoring these hidden costs will have a serious impact on business. However, these issues are easily mitigated with careful planning, implementation and management:

*Focus policies on information and people, not technologies or platforms

*Educate, monitor and enforce policies

*Embrace tools that are platform agnostic

*Deduplicate data in the cloud