Last week I wrote about the rising confidence that enterprise executives focused on regulatory and legal compliance issues now have in the security of cloud computing. As I’ve mentioned before, my team at Microsoft works with these leaders on a host of such issues as compliance with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), fair and ethical AI, and cybersecurity. From time to time we survey them to take their temperature on the key questions of the day, and the security of data and applications in the cloud is certainly one of those. In our most recent survey (commissioned from IDC), we found that four out of five compliance decision makers now believe that cloud and on-premises IT are equally secure. That represents a big swing from our 2016 survey, when two thirds still believed that that on-premises was more secure.
This week I want to offer another finding from the same IDC survey. The data point is simple but compelling. We asked 200 compliance decision makers at large U.S. enterprises (1,000 or more employees) how much of their critical enterprise data they were planning to store in the cloud, and the answer surprised even us:
Counting up across all types of cloud, including basic IT infrastructure (such as Azure or AWS) and full-fledged applications (such as Office 365 or Salesforce.com), the respondents said that they already store 52% of their critical enterprise data in the cloud and expect this number to rise to 67% by 2020.
This finding tells us that we have already reached the tipping point in the transition to cloud as the dominant architecture in enterprise IT. But the cloud is not a static place. Even as more and more enterprise data shifts to the cloud, the overall size of the cloud keeps growing. This is confirmed by another IDC study, which finds that the total amount of stored digital data in the world continues to grow exponentially, rising from about 20 zettabytes in 2018 to an estimated 47 zettabytes in 2020. In case you’re wondering, one zettabyte is a billion terabytes. This means that by sometime next year we can expect that the world will be storing more than 6 terabytes of data for every living human, and that number will still be growing very rapidly. In short, even when two thirds of critical enterprise data have shifted to the cloud, the headroom for further growth in absolute terms will remain very high.
What are the forces that have brought us to this tipping point in enterprise attitudes toward the cloud? Of course the fundamental driver is the vast movement of digital transformation that organizations of all types and sizes are undergoing. We are moving to a world where every detail of every business process, every interaction with customers, every action by employees or machinery, every aspect of every organization’s social and even natural environment is going to be captured digitally and fed into algorithms that seek to improve outcomes, not just for shareholders but—we hope and expect—for all stakeholders.
