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Companies of all sizes are adopting the cloud in some form or fashion. There are several challenges to utilizing various public cloud offerings and many companies fail to realize that they’re ultimately responsible for their cloud-stored data.

In a recent survey of 1,200 global companies conducted by Vanson Bourne and commissioned by Veritas, the majority are misguided when it comes to securing their data in public clouds.

• 83% of organizations believe cloud providers take responsibility for data protection. They assume that once their data is uploaded to the cloud, it's safe. In reality, it’s quite the opposite. Cloud providers are not responsible for the information that exists on their cloud. It is up to the organization to perform consistent backups of cloud-based data as part of its backup and data protection strategy.

• 69% of organizations believe a cloud provider has full responsibility for data privacy and compliance regulations for the data stored in their cloud. Just because your data isn't on your storage platform, doesn't excuse you from the laws around it. Cloud providers aren't legally responsible for any data an organization stores in the cloud. Proper measures and auditing must be put in place to implement policies around the safeguarding, maintenance and elimination of data.

• 54% of organizations believe it's the responsibility of the cloud provider to securely transfer data between on-premise data centers and the cloud. There are many challenges present (e.g. lack of in-house skills, complexity, legacy limitations, lack of strategy, data siloes, etc.) when migrating workloads to the cloud. These challenges must be taken into consideration when developing and executing a cloud migration strategy. It is here where most companies fall short and fail to experience a smooth migration.

• 58% of organizations believe that application performance is the responsibility of the cloud provider. When a workload is moved to the cloud and doesn't perform as expected, what’s the exit strategy from the cloud? It’s either to move the data back to an on-premise data center or another cloud. Being able to quickly move workloads around when performance or outages occur in the cloud can be a business-critical objective for a company.

These numbers may be higher than expected. What they tell us is that many customers don't fully understand how data management happens in the cloud.

We're here to help educate customers on what is best for their business, and help them build a solid solution around data migration and cloud data management.

To read the full Truth in Cloud report, click here.

By Brett Johnson

Published with permission from http://blog.techdata.com/authority