Commvault Releases Survey Results on Enterprise Cloud Adoption
75% of survey respondents cited data protection and backup as the cloud project with the greatest impact on their business.

CommVault today announced the results of a survey commissioned by IT market research firm CITO Research titled “IT Leaders Do Worry About the Cloud: An Executive Cloud Survey.”

This survey, conducted with 100 executives across the technology, finance, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, and telecommunications industries in the United States, focused on executives' overall perspectives and business strategies regarding the cloud. Our survey found that 81% of business executives and IT decision makers are extremely or very concerned about falling behind in cloud adoption.

81% of respondents said they were extremely or very concerned about falling behind in adopting cloud technologies.

According to the survey, business leaders are accelerating their cloud strategy adoption to keep pace with the rapidly evolving cloud landscape, with 93% of respondents reporting that they are migrating at least some workloads to the cloud. Specifically, 56% of respondents said they have already migrated or plan to migrate all their workloads to the cloud.

In this survey, 75% of business leaders cited data protection and backup as the cloud project with the greatest impact on their business. But despite citing data protection and backup as the most important use cases for cloud, 63% of respondents still worry about being able to quickly recover data from the cloud.

The top barriers preventing more applications and data from migrating to the cloud include the sheer volume of data (68%), difficulty securing talent to support data migration (65%), and establishing and managing data policies across the cloud and on-premises (55%).

Regarding investment plans for future cloud migration, 87% of respondents said they plan to invest more in the coming year, while only 4% said they plan to reduce their investments. Furthermore, regarding data security and recovery, 91% of respondents said they are protecting data in SaaS or cloud-based applications.

The main reasons companies move to the cloud are to gain business agility (33%), reduce costs (22%), and innovate and develop new applications, products, and services (20%).

Perceptions of the cloud transition were generally positive. Fifty-one percent of respondents described the cloud transition as transformative, while 35% found it exciting. Conversely, only 1% of respondents described the cloud transition as confusing, and 13% said it was expensive.

Regarding perceptions of cloud migration, 51% of respondents said it was "innovative," and 35% said it was "exciting."

"This survey shows that enterprises are making the transition to the cloud even as they struggle to understand its capabilities," said Dan Woods, chief technology officer at CITO Research. "As the cloud becomes more business-critical, data protection and recovery are also becoming increasingly critical."