Australian businesses are moving data to the cloud and utilising both private and public services, and this fragmented approach could create IT blind spots and increase information-based risks, according to new research by Veritas Technologies.

The State of the Hybrid Cloud report surveyed more than 135 Australian organisations to better understand local businesses cloud adoption behaviours from an information management perspective.

Overall, the research revealed that business-critical workloads in the public cloud are set to double in the next 24 months - roughly the same rate as non-critical workloads. This will add additional pressure on IT departments to ensure their entire business services, not just their infrastructure, are highly available and secure, Veritas finds.

Louis Tague, Veritas' managing director for Australia and New Zealand, says, “We are seeing an increase in trust when moving data to the cloud, however this also translates to additional pressure for service providers to ensure high availability and the need to avoid any unplanned downtime.

"This opens up new challenges for the IT department in selecting the right information protection strategies for their infrastructure, both on and off-premise, to ensure that there is no compromise to their information integrity."

The survey found that globally, 74% of enterprises are currently leveraging two or more cloud infrastructure vendors to support their workload requirements and 23% are using four or more vendors. This means that the burden of protecting, managing and utilising the data across these heterogeneous environments will largely rely on IT departments.

Geographically, Japan, Brazil and Australia lead the way in leveraging the public cloud with roughly 50% more workloads moving to the public cloud than the U.S., Canada, France and Germany, the survey finds.

Furthermore, 34% of workloads today exist in a private cloud, with 33% in a public cloud. However, these numbers are expected to grow at rates of 3% and 15%, respectively, over the next 12 months in Australia.

A sizeable number of respondents noted that certain workloads would always remain on-premises rather than migrating to the cloud. In Australia, 19% state that disaster recovery and relational or OLTP databases will remain on-premises and 18% will continue to keep archive workloads on-premises.

Compared to respondents in other countries, Australian respondents are less likely to receive security benefits when it comes to hybrid cloud, however, Australian respondents are most likely to cite cost benefits (48%).

The survey also found that legacy on-premises workloads in are set to decrease by 27% in the next 12 months in Australia, from the current 33% to 26%. This is consistent with Australian organisations' growing appetite to adopt new technologies as they are one of the fastest adopters of private cloud architecture with 47% using private cloud.