Just over half of the large Belgian companies are concerned about their data in the cloud. This has implications for the cloud strategy.

51 percent of large Belgian companies are concerned about their data in the cloud. This is the result of a survey by the CIO advocacy group Beltug among companies with 200 or more employees. You mention several issues, but two stand out in particular: data security and whether sensitive data is stored outside the EU. 94.1 percent and 78 percent respectively lose sleep as a result.

There are also more practical problems. For example, 66.9 percent find it harder to leave the cloud than to go there. You’re struggling with exiting a cloud solution. 53 percent see problems with the financial and time expenditure when retrieving the data. 56 percent have problems with the possibility of combining data from a cloud provider with data in other applications.

Security and lock in

It is also striking that the SLAs do little to allay fears of problems. 63.8 percent of respondents have doubts about what can happen if a provider has a serious problem.

As many large Belgian companies are concerned about data in the cloud as in a similar survey two years ago. In addition, the problems that cause it are not new. Finally, we can divide the above shortcomings into two categories: data protection and the consequences of vendor lock-in. This shows that the cloud providers have not really managed to position their services differently in the last two years, despite more locally anchored services.

Down with the cloud first, but with Azure on top

The effect is noticeable. The popularity of a Cloud firstThe strategy has declined and many companies are even looking back to on-premises as the first choice. 23.6 percent state that they want to do as much as possible locally, compared to 18.9 percent who initially rely on the cloud. In line with other studies, the hybrid approach is also the champion in this country: 56.6 percent of those surveyed continue to develop per workload where things are going best.

In conclusion, when looking for a cloud provider, there is really only one first choice for large Belgian companies, and that is Microsoft. 85 percent choose Azure, followed by only 13.5 percent for AWS and 9.7 percent for Google. Beltug’s numbers are even more extreme than our own research, which also left no doubt about Azure’s dominance.