99% of enterprises are overspending on public cloud, research shows

Veritas Technologies, a provider of multi-cloud data management, commissioned research that revealed that the vast majority of enterprises fail to stay within their cloud budgets. In fact, 99% of respondents in the UAE reported that their organization’s costs were higher than expected when using a public cloud service provider (CSP), and that they are overspending by an average of 45%.

Veritas’ latest report, ‘Securing Your Enterprise in a Multi-Cloud Environment Research,’ which surveyed 1,500 technology and IT decision-makers across 12 countries, revealed that enterprises clearly see value in the public cloud, with 100% of respondents globally agreeing that using CSPs and their tools provided benefits to the organization, such as flexibility, scalability, and mobility.

However, many organisations are planning their cloud budgets without fully understanding what they are ultimately going to need to pay for. For example, most (97%) of respondents in the UAE believed that the CSP would be responsible for protecting some of their assets in the cloud. This is rarely the case as most CSPs make it very clear that, while they are on the line to ensure the resiliency *of* the cloud, their customers shoulder the responsibility for the data and applications *in* the cloud.

This is an important distinction because the study found that data in the cloud is a highly appealing target for cybercriminals. In the UAE, 95 percent of respondents said they had experienced a ransomware attack on their cloud environments in the previous 12 months.

Ramzi Itani, Regional Director at Veritas said: “The UAE is a global hub for digital transformation and is leading the charge when it comes to public cloud adoption globally. Yet, as each new solution is introduced into an organisation’s technology stack, it adds more complexity. Our latest research from Veritas highlights just how much this complexity is making UAE businesses susceptible to overspending on public cloud solutions. With respondents in the UAE increasingly aware of the risks of using only cloud provider security tools for protection, the next step is to reassess their strategy and ensure that their data protection efforts are factored in and budgeted for right from the start.”

Because of misunderstandings about the cloud responsibility model, many businesses have overlooked the need for third-party data protection, leaving their critical data vulnerable to ransomware attacks and other data-loss incidents. More than half (52%) of organizations in the UAE have lost data as a result of solely relying on backup tools built into CSP solutions. Furthermore, 77% of the same respondents agreed that current CSP offerings fall short of their organization’s security requirements.

As a result, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the study found that unforeseen data protection requirements were the most common source of unexpected cloud costs, with 44% citing backup and recovery as the leading area of overspend.