The majority of IT professionals are putting their faith in the cloud when it comes to the safety of company data, according to new research from Evolve IP.

According to a new survey, eight in ten IT professionals and executives believe their organisation's data is safer in the cloud than on premises, when facing hardware malfunctions and environmental disasters.

The survey reveals that 91% of all organisations now have at least one service in the cloud.

According to Evolve IP, data security is an ongoing concern for IT and this year's survey asked respondents where they felt their data was safest.

When questioned about data environments, 50% believe that a private cloud is safest when compared to public clouds or an on premise data center.

Specifically, when asked about physical disasters (environmental or hardware failure) 55% felt their information was safest in a private cloud compared to 27.5% in a public cloud and 17.5% on premise.

Looking at malicious attacks, 52% preferred a private cloud to safeguard their data versus 38% on premise and 10% public cloud.

Other key results of the survey showed that, on average, organisations have nearly five services (4.9) in the cloud, a marked increase from the 2.7 services noted in last year's results.

Servers/data centers, Microsoft Exchange and Office, and disaster recovery were cited as the top deployed cloud services. Additionally, the survey indicated that adoption will continue to be strong, with 74.5% of respondents planning on adding new or additional cloud services in the next three years.

According to the research, 53% of organisations had deployed a cloud solution on their own, up from 43% in 2014.

However, when asked if they had to start the deployment over, nearly half (48.5%) said they would outsource to a solution provider the next time - doubling the total of 24% from 2014.

"This year's survey reinforces last year's data and shows continued momentum for the deployment of cloud services. It also revealed some interesting changes," comments Guy Fardone, president and founding partner of Evolve IP.

"As we predicted last year, the average number of services deployed in the cloud by an individual organisation jumped significantly and we expect to see similar increases over the next several years,” he says.

“From the responses received, we believe that there are two driving factors behind this increase.

“First, there is finally alignment between executives and IT managers about the value of the cloud - previously IT managers were more skeptical,” Fardone says.

“Second, nine out of 10 respondents feel that the cloud is now a mature technology and this is alleviating many concerns about reliability and customer experience."

Additional Findings:

• Just over 1/3 of survey respondents noted that individual departments like sales, marketing, operations and HR had deployed a cloud service independently. However, of those installations, IT was only involved about half of the time.
• Over the last three years, respondents' impressions of the maturity of the cloud has changed. In 2013, one out of four respondents felt that the cloud was an immature technology. Today, just one in 10 (12%) feel the same.
• Five in 10 respondents would prefer to rely on a single cloud provider versus having a unique provider for each service.
• The top services survey respondents expect to deploy in the cloud over the next three years are servers/data centers (22.5%), phone systems (21.5%) disaster recovery (21%), Finance / ERP (18.5%) and co-location/backup (17%).