High costs of cloud adoption still major barrier, report says

Proponents of cloud computing often argue that one of the major benefits of cloud adoption is reduced costs for the IT and other business departments over time.

However, the severity of the upfront costs are sometimes ignored. A recent survey of nearly 600 companies across several different industries, conducted by online backup services StorageCraft and Symform, found that two-thirds of these respondents ranked the costs of cloud or backup systems as a problem.

Roughly 40 percent of respondents noted that they use a cloud-based solution for either primary or secondary backup, yet only 15 percent overall admitted that they were very satisfied with their current solution or procedure for data backup.

For reference, approximately 83 percent of the organizations that participated had 1,000 employees or less, while 200 respondents represented IT service providers or consultants -- a critical channel to the SMB market.

For these smaller companies, Network Attach Storage (NAS) devices still ranked as the most commonly used method for primary data backup with 50 percent of the vote. Cloud backup solutions accounted for 35 percent.

Cloud as a backup option grew in popularity slightly when you consider it as a secondary option, which accounted for 39 percent of these businesses.

One of the problems here is that although many of these companies looked at the cloud favorably, most of them are expecting significant growth in data volumes over the next year -- some as much as a 100 percent increase. That's a huge financial and security challenge, and it's not easy for smaller companies with smaller budgets to adopt an entirely new system so quickly.

Margaret Dawson, vice president of marketing and product management at Symform, pointed out in the report that the research validates that small and medium businesses are turning to the cloud, but that "it’s clear there is room for improvement around overall costs and data restore capabilities."

In the long run, it's going to be even more detrimental if those issues aren't addressed immediately, according to Dawson, who added, "These challenges are why nearly 25% of the companies are doing only single-tier backup, which puts their business at a huge risk if they were to have a local data loss event."

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