Research commissioned by Veritas Technologies, a leader in multi-cloud data management, has revealed that the vast majority of enterprises are failing to stay within their cloud budgets. In fact, 99% of respondents in the UAE have reported that their organisation has incurred higher costs than originally anticipated when using a public cloud service provider (CSP) and are overspending by an average of 45%.
Veritas’ latest report, ‘Securing Your Enterprise in a Multi-Cloud Environment Research’, which surveyed 1,500 technology and IT decision-makers across 12 countries, showed that enterprises clearly see value in the public cloud, as 100% of respondents globally agreed that using CSPs and their tools provided benefits to the organisation, such as flexibility, scalability and mobility.
However, many organisations are planning their cloud budgets without fully understanding what they are ultimately going to need to pay for. For example, most (97%) of respondents in the UAE believed that the CSP would be responsible for protecting some of their assets in the cloud. This is rarely the case as most CSPs make it very clear that, while they are on the line to ensure the resiliency *of* the cloud, their customers shoulder the responsibility for the data and applications *in* the cloud.
This is an important distinction since the research highlighted that data in the cloud is a highly attractive target for cybercriminals. In the UAE, it was reported that 95 of respondents had experienced a ransomware attack on their cloud environments in the last 12 months.
The misunderstanding around the cloud responsibility model means that many companies have not factored in the requirement for third-party data protection and are leaving their critical data vulnerable to these ransomware attacks – and other data-loss incidents. More than half (52%) of organisations in the UAE have lost data as a result of relying solely on the backup tools built into solutions by their CSPs. And 77% of the same respondents agreed that current offerings from CSPs fall short of their organisation’s security needs.
As a result, it is, perhaps, unsurprising that the research showed that unforeseen data protection needs were the most common source of unexpected cloud costs, with 44% citing backup and recovery as the leading area of overspend.
Ramzi Itani, Regional Director at Veritas said: “The UAE is a global hub for digital transformation and is leading the charge when it comes to public cloud adoption globally. Yet, as each new solution is introduced into an organisation’s technology stack, it adds more complexity. Our latest research from Veritas highlights just how much this complexity is making UAE businesses susceptible to overspending on public cloud solutions. With respondents in the UAE increasingly aware of the risks of using only cloud provider security tools for protection, the next step is to reassess their strategy and ensure that their data protection efforts are factored in and budgeted for right from the start”.
