Here are some takeaways from the report:
- Opting to use the cloud in some way can help institutions find that extra storage where and when they need it. Among higher education respondents, 56% say they have seen increased agility and efficiency from using the public cloud, and 47% have seen scalability benefits.
- Higher education’s sentiments around cloud costs are mixed, with 44% saying the high cost of investing in on-premises assets is one of the biggest maintenance challenges, while 38% of respondents have seen total cost of ownership benefits from using the public cloud.
- Having skilled in-house staff is key for 69% of respondents, but 50% say their institution has a lack of on-staff cloud skills. Moving workloads to the cloud has helped 41% of respondents decrease their staffing needs, while 26% haven’t seen a change.
- The survey results reflect security’s importance to the sector, with 32% of respondents calling it the most important reason they might keep an application on-premises. For those respondents who indicated that they have repatriated data back to on-premises infrastructure, more than half (52%) said they did so because of security concerns.
