There’s a dichotomy between what enterprises aspire toward with leveraging the cloud for digital transformation and the brick wall many companies face when they confront the challenge head on.

On one hand, 74% of on-premises applications are cloud candidates for the average organization as digital transformation efforts mature. However, security, performance, and migration costs keep apps on-premises, with 54% of organizations surveyed by the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) trusting on-prem data security more than cloud and only 17% saying they trust the cloud versus on-premises.

Christophe Bertrand, senior analyst and practice director at ESG, points out that companies want digital transformation for many reasons: operational efficiency (54%), develop new data-centric products and services (47%), offer better customer experiences (45%), and develop innovative products and services (41%).

But when pressed to make the change, those surveyed say they prefer on-premises to cloud data centers because performance requirements for cloud could be more cost effective (30%), security requirements are difficult to implement (29%), and cloud systems are too costly or complicated to implement (29%).

Bertrand adds that 39% say they know they have lost cloud-resident data and another 20% suspect they lost some cloud-resident data. And ransomware has become a big issue, with 13% saying they’ve experienced a ransomware attack on a daily basis and 17% say they’ve experienced an incident once a week.

Three ways MSPs help customers develop a secure cloud strategy

While the cloud offers flexibility and cost benefits, security has become a major concern – and that’s why Hitachi Vantara works with managed service providers (MSPs) to explain that it doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposition.

Arvin Reddy, chief technologist for cloud service providers at Hitachi Vantara, says his team has worked out a three-step program to help MSPs work with customers to develop a cloud strategy that makes sense for them, yet delivers the security and data protection that’s required into today’s threat environment:

• Embrace a hybrid cloud approach: MSPs need to get customers to understand that hybrid cloud is the future. When customers embrace hybrid cloud, they can update their legacy applications, keep them on-premises, and then move the workloads that enhance the business to the cloud.
• Conduct a cloud assessment: Offer customers a framework where they can control their costs, save on CapEx costs for important business apps and really focus on the legacy apps they want to keep.
• Develop a business continuity plan focused on storage: MSPs need to explain that with Hitachi Vantara storage, they can offer 100% data availability – even after an outage.

“In the end, it's about the storage, that's where the customer’s data will reside,” explains Reddy. “So with Hitachi Vantara, when there’s an outage and the customer’s data goes offline, once it comes back, their data is still intact.”

Want to learn more about helping customers securely leverage cloud in 2024? Watch this webinar.

Image Credit: Hitachi Vantara / ESG Leveraging your cloud securely webinar