Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 30 | Page 67

Y IS MULTI-CLOUD PTION BECOMING O SUCCESSFUL ROSS THE EMEA REGION? /////////////////////////////////////////////// “Inflexible, one-size-fits-all solutions won’t work anymore in the cloud, so it is encouraging to see that per-application strategies are becoming more widespread in EMEA,” said Brett Ley, Senior EMEA Cloud Director, F5 Networks. “Every application is unique and serves a specific function, such as finance, sales, or production. Each will have end-users that scale from less than 100 to into the millions. And each has a different risk exposure that can span from a breach being simply embarrassing to costing the business billions of dollars’ worth of damage.” A total of 33% of EMEA organisations cited regulatory compliance as the biggest challenge when managing applications in multi-cloud environments, which was once again higher than any other region and partly due to complexities stemming from the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Other pressing concerns included applying consistent security policies across all applications (30%), safeguarding against emerging threats (28%) and migrating applications between clouds and data centres (28%). When it comes to security postures, respondents reported lower confidence levels in their ability to withstand an application-layer attack in the public cloud (only 15% were ‘very confident’ they could do so), versus in an on-premises data centre (30%) or via colocation deployments (20%). The cloud security challenge is further exacerbated by a growing industry skill gap: as many as 66% of EMEA organisations believe they lack necessary security talent going forward. America is closely behind with 65% having claimed the same. The problem was most pronounced in the APJC region where it was an issue for 76%. www.intelligentcio.com