Public cloud computing was poised on the edge of the mainstream for several years before the world was locked down in early 2020. Since then, firms’ pandemic-driven digital transformation efforts have accelerated the uptake of these cloud services, making them widely popular.
Global expenditure on public cloud providers is estimated to have risen from $270bn (£200bn) in the first year of the pandemic to more than $330bn in 2021, according to Gartner. It notes that the Covid crisis has helped many chief information officers to overcome resistance in their organisations to removing mission-critical IT resources from their premises and entrusting a third-party provider to host and manage them instead.
Partly because of this shift, there has been a marked increase in the amount of data that’s being collected and stored. Although using a public cloud offers several benefits, there are also some potential pitfalls to avoid. Particularly when moving their data to the cloud, organisations need to take these risks into account.