More and more of our corporate clients have a move to the cloud as a priority for this year. Where cloud was a conversation point it is now a goal.

Yet, while the desire is there doubts remain.

Security concerns

Data security remains a primary concern – with breaches at leading cloud providers remaining a point of concern.

However, in practice, data security challenges are often a bi-product of regulatory concerns that have a broader impact

Data privacy regulations

Regulations such as the PoPI Act in South Africa and GDPR in Europe put more control over how personal data is stored and used in the hands of the consumer.

Amongst other factors, data residency requires that data is stored within the country of residence of a consumer unless good business reasons and/or permission exists to store it elsewhere.

This creates a burden on companies using the cloud that must now understand how data flows across borders and must manage the regulatory differences of these differing geographies.

Cloud computing equals outsourcing

Regulators in the US and other jurisdictions see cloud computing as equivalent to outsourcing control of services and data. The implications under US law are that the corporation remains liable for mishaps, such as data breaches, that may occur in the cloud, although they have less control over the infrastructure and security controls that may be in place.

Security is not the only concern.

Legacy technology

The sheer size and scale of existing technology investments can limit both the scale and speed of the move to the cloud.

The mainframe remains a core transactional platform for many large organisations. Many companies may have large, complex enterprise data warehouse environments and need to do a lot of risk assessment before making a decision to move this data to the cloud.

Where the cloud may work well for these kinds of companies is to offload computing power at busy periods, such as month or quarter end, rather than investing in hardware that may stand idle much of the time.

This means that a hybrid on-premise and cloud environment will be a common compromise. The ability to optimise how cloud data is stored is critical to managing costs, but also helps to manage regulatory and similar risks.

Cloud governance

Ultimately, the drive to the cloud will succeed, or fail, based on your ability to understand and govern your data, on-premise and in the cloud.