Chinese Companies Begin to Pay Attention to Cloud Computing Security

A recent investigation conducted by CA Technologies showed that more and more Chinese companies are considering cloud computing as part of their data protection programs. About 46% of the companies surveyed said it will be playing important roles in their data protection strategy of the next budgetary year. At the same time, along with its popularity, Chinese companies begin to realize that cloud resources are able to provide solutions for their business continuity.

According to this investigation, investment in data protection has been increasing continuously. Almost all (99%) of the 202 companies involved in the investigations said, their data protection budget for the 2010-2011 period will maintain the same level or increase slightly compared to the previous fiscal year, among them, 10% of the companies have actually increased their investment.

About 1/3 of the companies said they will concentrate on management of mixed cloud computing environment, while private cloud computing will be a supplement to the public facilities. Over half (51%) of the companies surveyed plan to invest in public clouds , to enable it as one of the backup solutions, likewise 51% of them will invest in private clouds as well.

More and more Chinese companies consider cloud computing as part of their business continuity strategy. Although many companies have already been using it for remote backups and disaster recovery, there are still many companies looking for more mature and mixed cloud mode. That explains the need for a total solution, which will enable the companies to protect their data in a complicated computing environment involving private, public and even mixed cloud computing, according to actual situation.

Although cloud computing technology is adopted, and even with an active development trends in the data protection investment, many companies are still facing security threats. All companies in the investigation admitted that they have experienced data losses and application failures over the past year. One of the most frequent reasons is the IT system failure, incl. network, storage, hardware and software. Over 2/3 of them said they are effected by these incidents.

High rate of data losses reflect the lack of preparation for the defense against those failures. Only 8% of them were enough confident of their capability of disaster recovery. In addition, although 97% of the companies investigated carried out an overall test of their disaster recovery systems at least once a year, yet about 43% of those tested cannot meet the recovery time and level targets during the tests.

The main obstacles to the success of the data protection and disaster recovery, according to 65% of these companies, were the lack of understanding of their employees, insufficient working procedures, while 52% of them pointed out that short of budget was the key factor.

In general, there are still shortcomings of the data protection programs among the Chinese companies, as a result, they are challenged with danger any moment. An earlier research showed that an average APAC company will suffer a financial loss of about US$ 350 000 a year out of the service shutdown of their computing facilities.