StorageCraft Global Research: Public Clouds and Recovery

In our previous posts covering the results of a global research study commissioned by StorageCraft, we focused on data growth and what CEOs need to know followed by our post on recovery planning. In this post, we’ll take a look at how IT decision-makers (ITDMs) view security in the cloud and the apparent lack of clarity in regard to cloud data recovery.

Most See Safety in the Cloud

With so much hype about how secure the cloud is, it may come as surprise that only 59 percent of responding ITDMs said that data backed up to a public cloud—like Google Cloud Platform or AWS—is safest, leaving 41 percent who say that on-prem backups are safer. Perhaps unsurprisingly, cloud-first companies put more faith in the security of public clouds than more traditional companies. The data breaks down like this:

• 76 percent of cloud-first companies feel the cloud is safer than on-premises (24% don’t)
• 63 percent of ITDMs with traditional infrastructures say on-premises is safer (37% don’t)

These data points make sense. If you’ve built your business using cloud technology, you’re more likely to believe it’s the best place to keep your data secure. In reality, there’s no right or wrong here. Your backup and disaster recovery strategy should be unique to your specific needs. As a starting point, we suggest you check out StorageCraft’s take on the 3-2-1 backup rule, then consider which approach is optimal for your situation and budget—on-premises, cloud, or a hybrid of the two.

Who’s Responsible for Recovery?

One data point from the study that jumped out at us was that there is a pretty even divide in understanding who is responsible for the recovery of data stored in public clouds, with 54 percent saying it is their own responsibility and 46% believing that responsibility lies with the cloud provider. The reality is that your company is responsible. That's why having a clear understanding of your public cloud provider’s backup and recovery policies—then building a disaster recovery strategy that ensures you’re covered—is so important. That includes taking where your data is stored into account and who is responsible and how it will be retrieved if the need ever arises. Check out our IT disaster recovery checklist as a starting point. With ever-growing data vulnerabilities and threats to business continuity out there, you need to be proactive. In fact, StorageCraft saw a 6x increase in recovery requests from our StorageCraft Cloud Services Disaster Recovery as a Service) customers last year alone because of ransomware attacks. So you need to know with certainty what to do if your data is compromised. In our next and final post in this series, we’ll cover ITDM opinions and attitudes about ransomware and recovery.