Financial Industry IT Professionals and Executives Believe Data is Safer in the Cloud than On-Premises

Evolve IP Survey of 110+ Credit Union, Banking and other Financial Professionals Reveals Cloud Growth, Compliance Needs and Deployment Trends
WAYNE, Pa. - April 6, 2017 - PRLog -- Financial industry IT professionals and executives believe overwhelmingly that when facing hardware malfunctions, malicious attacks and environmental disasters, their organization's data is safer in the cloud than on premises according to a technology survey released today by Evolve IP. The survey also revealed a preference for private cloud infrastructure over public clouds for data security. The survey of more than 110 financial industry professionals, which provides current cloud adoption trends and future cloud deployment insights, also revealed that 87 percent of all financial organizations now have at least one service in the cloud.

Data security is an ongoing concern for IT and this year's survey asked respondents where they felt their data was safest under three common risk scenarios: environmental disasters, malicious attacks (e.g. cyberattacks) and hardware failure.

     • For hardware malfunctions, the most common scenario for disaster recovery, 52 percent felt their information was safest in a private cloud compared to 33 percent in a public cloud and 15 percent on premises.

     • For malicious attacks, 54.5 percent preferred a private cloud to safeguard their data versus 34 percent on premise and 11.5 percent in a public cloud.

     • For environmental disasters - 50 percent felt their information was safest in a private cloud compared to 43.75 percent in a public cloud and 6.25 percent on premise.

Other key results of the survey showed that, on average, financial organizations have around three services (3.25 average) in the cloud. Servers/data centers, Microsoft Exchange and Office, and other SaaS offerings were cited as the top deployed cloud services. Additionally, the survey indicated that adoption will continue to be strong, with 87.5 percent of respondents planning on adding new or additional cloud services in the next three years.

The survey results also found that 53.5 percent of organizations had deployed a cloud solution on their own versus using a third party provider. However, when asked if they had to start the deployment over, nearly half (45.5 percent) said they would outsource to a solution provider the next time.

"Financial organizations have recognized the significant benefits of the cloud and the pace of their adoption, and planned future adoption, is faster than many other industries," said Scott Kinka, Chief Technology Officer of Evolve IP. "Leveraging the Evolve IP Compliance CloudTM for PCI and FFIEC, along with geographically redundant Tier IV data centers, Evolve IP can help these organizations successfully deploy compliant cloud computing and communications services to secure systems and data, drive productivity and improve member and customer experiences."

Additional Findings:

     • The overwhelming majority of respondents indicated PCI and FFIEC compliance requirements (54 percent and 43 percent respectively)

     • Budget increases for 2017 were expected by 57.5 percent of respondents with just 4 percent planning a decrease.

     • The top services survey respondents expect to deploy in the cloud over the next three years include data backup (52 percent), Office / Exchange (43.5 percent / 42 percent) and phone systems (31 percent).

Survey Methodology

The blind, web-based survey was conducted by Evolve IP during January of 2017, featuring over 1,300 respondents in multiple industries across North America. Over 110 of the respondents indicated they were in the financial industry. Of the financial respondents, 72.5 percent came from organizations with between 50 and 5,000 employees, 14 percent from companies with more than 5,000, 10 percent were businesses with 11-49 associates and 3.5 percent were small businesses with 10 employees or less. Evolve IP customers were excluded from the survey.

ABOUT EVOLVE IP

Evolve IP is The Cloud Services Company™. Designed from the beginning to provide organizations with a unified option for cloud services, Evolve IP enables decision-makers to migrate all or select IT technologies to its award-winning cloud platform. Evolve IP's combination of security, stability, scalability, and lower total cost of ownership is fundamentally superior to outdated legacy systems and other cloud offerings. Today the company's services, including disaster recovery, IP phone systems / unified communications, contact centers, virtual desktops, IaaS and more, are deployed by more than 1,300 commercial business accounts with a combined 130,000+ users, licensed seats and managed end points. Visit www.EvolveIP.net for more information.

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