Survey finds key IT concerns – 87% suffer downtime of an hour or more

Ixia, a Keysight Business, has released the findings from new research that delved into the concerns of IT professionals around the world.

Conducted by Dimensional Research and commissioned by Ixia, the cloud security survey polled over 350 IT professionals in companies larger than 1,000 employees with primary responsibility for cloud deployments and management.

And the results? Data privacy and compliance, security, and achieving full data visibility are all among the top challenges for IT professionals with responsibility for cloud deployments.

More than 90 percent of respondents are concerned about data and application security in public clouds, while nearly 60 percent reported that public cloud environments make It more difficult to obtain visibility into data traffic.

"As cloud adoption grows, concerns are shifting from migration topics to security and data visibility topics in the cloud environment," says Jeff Harris, chief marketing officer at Ixia.

"Companies realise it is vital to have access to comprehensive cloud visibility solutions. This survey highlights how much enterprises are concerned about data visibility in every public and private cloud they operate.

The key findings of the survey include:

• 88 percent experienced a business-related issue from a lack of visibility into public cloud data traffic
• The top three challenges companies experience due to lack of visibility into their public cloud data include troubleshooting application performance issues, troubleshooting network performance issues and application outages, and rapid response resolving security alerts and network outages
• The top three priorities for organisations with public cloud environments include securing data and applications, satisfying compliance requirements, and increasing cloud expertise
• 87 percent suffered downtime of an hour or more during their last network outage, which according to Gartner, can cost a company as much as $5,600 for each minute, as well as impact customer satisfaction
• 99 percent confirm that scalability is key for cloud monitoring solutions

Vice president of product management at Ixia, Sunil Kalidindi says businesses need to change their practices to find the balance between security and flexibility.

"Enterprises need to leverage the cloud for a variety of good business reasons, but they want to know their data and applications are safe and secure," says Kalidindi.