According to a study by Cicero Group and Veritas Technologies, the private cloud, and public cloud alliance continues to grow in business.

Three-quarters of companies worldwide continue their adoption of hybrid cloud, by definition involving the private cloud and public cloud. This is the salient point of a recent study sponsored by Cicero Group Technologies and Veritas.

The results show the importance of a sophisticated corporate strategy for information management and security. For the study, Veritas and Cicero Group interviewed more than 1,800 worldwide IT executives with more than 500 employees and managed by at least 75 terabytes of data.

This study was especially noted the pace of switches to different kinds of cloud and motivations. This flip-flop now applies to all types of data, including critical data, which implies to adopt a real strategy and real security.

Nearly 38% of the volume of data is currently housed in a private cloud (+7% in one year) against 28% in a public cloud (+ 18%). In Japan and Brazil, it is 50% of the volume that is currently in the public cloud. 74% of companies use multiple cloud providers, and 23% use at least four suppliers. It increases the pressure on IT departments to secure the data on all of these environments.

In the breakdown by sectors, the manufacturing industry is in the first place. The manufacturing industry takes 30 percent of their workloads in the public cloud. Second place goes to telecommunications companies with 24 percent, followed by health care and finance, each with 23 percent. The public sector constitutes 16 percent cloud adoption.

More than a third of respondents cite cost as the main argument for the public cloud use. However, security remains the main obstacle. Half of respondents named security and backup architectures as the main reason to avoid the public cloud. Nearly 41 percent expect an improvement by introducing a hybrid cloud – which is internationally the highest percentage.

Security is also the most important factor for the satisfaction of enterprises with public cloud offerings. Providers of public cloud solutions should communicate their benefits in terms of safety.

A significant number of respondents indicated that they would always run certain workloads within the enterprise and do not move to the cloud. 28 percent cited in this context named backup and recovery, 27 percent disaster recovery and 26 percent archiving or data warehousing.

About 81 percent of companies not using cloud in the implementation and ongoing support to the services of service providers. The heterogeneous and complex composition of cloud solutions is therefore likely to remain a challenge for IT departments.

Companies are increasingly using heterogeneous solutions. From the perspective of information management, this can increase the complexity. Organizations must be more vigilant than ever to see blind spots of IT and potential safety issues. Only way they can avoid unplanned downtime or even an information crisis.

The study recommends several steps – the organizations should help to remain agile to minimize the risks inherent in the implementation of hybrid cloud environments. IT professionals should focus more on information management rather than on infrastructure.