How did the NSA affect UK cloud services in 2014?

It was one of the biggest stories of the year last year – there weren't many weeks a new Edward Snowden revelation didn't make it into the headlines. But how, if at all, have opinions on data security changed over the past 12 months? Does the NSA and PRISM still cast a shadow over our IT decisions? Every year, we conduct a Data Health Check survey of over 400 IT professionals in the UK to gauge opinions on all the big areas of technology – including backup, disaster recovery, employability and security.

In 2013, nearly half (45%) of our respondents admitted they had reviewed their contracts and security policies in response to the NSA/PRISM revelations. The report was released at the height of the scandal, so it's not surprising that it was at the forefront of people's minds, especially those working within IT and security.

Twelve months on, and a recent report from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) revealed that 59% of UK organisations are still "somewhat" to "extremely" concerned about the privacy of their data as a direct result of PRISM. What's interesting is that while the security is obviously still very much a factor to consider in the decision making process, it doesn't appear to be inhibiting cloud adoption. The same paper from CIF revealed that 69% of organisations have now formally adopted at least one cloud service, with 68% of those claiming they will extend their use of cloud services over the next year.

2015 will see adoption grow despite existing security concerns.

It is an interesting dilemma...and one that most 'cloud adoption' surveys seem to find. We are "concerned about cloud security" but at the same time we are adopting cloud services and planning to adopt more.

The fact that the cloud services market is maturing means that once people have adopted one cloud service, they realise the jump from on-premise IT isn't actually that big as long as they already have the correct processes in place. Our Data Health Check 2014 found that before adopting cloud services 81% of organisations valued security as a top priority, whereas after adopting 2 or more services this fell to 44% once businesses become comfortable with how secure cloud services are in reality.

While information security will always be a factor to consider for any business that handles data, as organisations adopt more cloud services into 2015 security "fears of the unknown" will play less of an important role in the decision making process.