SavoyStewart: Turns Out Even Financial Sector Employees Don’t Trust the Cloud

December 13, 2019         By: Steven Anderson

Simply put, a lot of folks out there just don’t trust cloud computing. On a certain level, even I don’t; I like to keep local backups of just about everything as a hedge if nothing else. Some might call that prudence rather than distrust, but in the end, I do it because I don’t like my only source of storage being so dependent on my internet access. It turns out that I’m not alone on this front, as a hefty number of financial industry professionals don’t trust the cloud fully either, according to research sent our way from SavoyStewart.

Distrust of cloud computing seems to be inversely related to just how much is understood about it. The financial services market distrusted cloud computing in 83 percent of cases, while those who claimed to understand it weighed in in just 36 percent of cases.

Insurance and healthcare weighed in in similar fashion; insurance featured 65 percent distrusting and 22 percent understanding, while healthcare boasted 77 percent distrust and 33 percent understanding. Demonstrating the converse were tech industry respondents, who noted just 31 percent distrust yet 80 percent understanding.

The exception was the hospitality industry, who demonstrated just six percent understanding, but only five percent distrust.

The biggest worries among those who didn’t trust cloud computing were the risks of unauthorized access, whether via leak or intrusion, and this was most prevalent among those who distrusted cloud most: financial, healthcare and insurance, especially in the UK.

A look at these results makes it easy to wonder if the answer is just simple evangelism; since the tech sector understands cloud roughly two to three times better than any other segment and has under half the level of distrust, perhaps the more understanding there is, the more trust there will be. Leaving aside the hospitality sector, which barely understands cloud computing yet trusts it almost completely, the notion of “the more you know, the less you fear” seems to be well in effect.

Still, there are some valid causes for alarm here, and it’s a safe bet that it will take more than education to wipe the distrust clean, if such a thing can ever be accomplished. In the end, though, a little extra information might be the most helpful thing.