By 2018, Most Governments Will Move To The Cloud For Security

By 2018, security will be the top reason making governments move to the cloud, reckons Gartner.

The research house predicts that in two years, the increased security it thinks comes with computing in the cloud will overtake cost savings and agility as the primary driver for government agencies to move to the public cloud.

Invest heavily

“Many cloud service providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google, invest heavily in incorporating higher levels of security into their products to continue building confidence that their data is more secure,” said Neville Cannon, research director at Gartner.

In fact, Gartner thinks that not only to cloud providers pump massive amounts of time in making their clouds secure, but that those security efforts are better than anything most nations could afford themselves.

“Many of these providers can invest more than what most nations could afford, let alone the average government agency,” said Cannon.

However, hindrances do remain, said Gartner. Nationalism and concerns about data sovereignty will likely continue to bring about a slow realisation about security benefits, as cost savings and agility are maintained as subsidiary drivers in the belief that data is more secure when retained within its jurisdiction.

Indeed, a survey conducted recently by Rackspace found that, currently, cost benefits of moving to the cloud are more influential than security benefits.

“Cloud has long been associated with a loss of control over information,” said Rackspace CSO Brian Kelly.

Yet Rackspace wants potential cloud customers to know that the cloud can indeed be safe, and it certainly should be a major driver for cloud migration. Kelly called the links between cloud and lack of security as a “misconception”.

“Organisations are increasingly seeing the cloud as a means to keeping their systems and information safe and in the year ahead security will be an accelerator, not an inhibitor, of cloud adoption,” said Kelly.

Take our cloud quiz here!