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A new survey from a cloud storage and data protection hardware provider has found that while personnel at more than half of organisations use public file, sync and share services, almost three quarters said they were seeking an alternative.

The account highlighted a growing interest and need for enterprise-grade, private cloud storage solutions. Dropbox business users have recently reached the 8 million user mark. These services continue to gain wide adoption.

Rani Osnat, a VP of strategic marketing, said there were few revelations in the survey, but there is still room for both public and private. “There are two ways you can look at these results,” he stated. “There is bigger adoption of SaaS services, but firms view them as more of a provisional solution, and eventually they want to take these solutions in-house.”

“The other deduction is that the market is increasing so much there is room for both of these things,” Osnat added. “Companies will continue to grow while private arrangements also grow in parallel; these things will live side by side.”

“I think there is not one answer that’s correct. They are both relevant,” he explains. “We certainly see from our own perspective of the market that when you talk to larger enterprises, especially the ones that are in regulated industries like banking or insurance, or healthcare, they definitely have a strong preference for private cloud solutions. They have the know-how, and they have strict security and compliance requirements that are not entirely satisfied by solutions that utilise a public cloud infrastructure.”

Osnat contends that, while the likes of businesses such as Dropbox have made a rigorous effort to increase security, more needs to be done. “When you look at cloud in general, and you say ‘I’m going to take my data, I’m going to store it someplace that’s outside my own data centres’, that already is a big obstacle to cross for many firms.

“What you need to do is cloak enough security around it for that firm to feel at least as happy with that concept as they do with keeping it in-house.”

Many cloud storage solutions are much better than not having it, while some key management concepts within Dropbox for example are definitely insufficient for enterprise use in the bigger scale.

“It’s a very sensitive issue with enterprises,” he clarifies. “Some of them will use these facilities on a departmental level, or some level with stern controls over what type of data can be shared with these services, but at the same time we know they all wish they had something superior, and that’s what many of these companies are striving for.

Concept ITS in Sunderland is one such company ever striving to create secure and private servers for many SMEs around the Sunderland and North East area.