Security concerns are restricting public cloud adoption in Australia, according to new research.

Organisations in Australia indicate that more than 76% of their IT infrastructure will be operating in the public cloud over the next five years, an increase from almost 45% today, according to a new study sponsored by Barracuda Networks.
However, the study reveals security remains the biggest roadblock to adoption for 80% of respondents, higher than the global average of 70%.

The global study of 750 global IT decision makers was conducted by Vanson Bourne in December 2019 to capture their experiences with moving infrastructure to the public cloud, concerns restricting adoption, as well as the security and networking solutions being implemented to overcome them.
The study involved 50 respondents in Australia.
 
"While adoption rates for public cloud continue to grow, security is still the leading roadblock for Australian organisations, which is understandable considering the volume and variety of threats they face today," says Andrew Huntley, regional director of ANZ and Pacific Islands for Barracuda.

According to the survey, the leading cloud security concerns for Australian organisations include the security of public cloud infrastructure (42%), the impact of cyberattacks (28%), shadow IT (28%) and the security of applications deployed in public cloud (24%).

Australian respondents indicated that the greatest threats to their public cloud infrastructure include open vulnerabilities in cloud applications (44%); sophisticated hackers (38%); ransomware (38%) and corporate network exposure to intrusions/attacks (38%). Sixty-eight percent of Australian respondents have already been targeted by a cyberattack, which is lower than the global average of 75%. After security, integration/network concerns come in second for Australian organisations in terms of public cloud adoption. This includes integrating public cloud with legacy technologies, better integration with private cloud, and enhanced integration with on-premises infrastructure.

The survey also revealed that secure software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) fully integrated into public cloud is the solution of choice. Twelve percent of Australian respondents have already deployed SD-WAN, with another 50% either in the process of deploying or expecting to deploy within the next 12 months. SD-WAN is being used by a quarter of those who have added security to their public cloud.

"As more IT infrastructure moves to public cloud, providers will offer more native network capabilities and public cloud will expand to include more network functionality," says Huntley.

"The vast majority of Australian organisations need their security vendors to offer advanced security and cloud connectivity tightly integrated with the major cloud platforms."