Dive Brief:

• Security remains a primary concern for companies currently using the cloud. But it also serves as a deterrent to those that aren’t yet using cloud, according to a Teradata customer survey of 900 senior business leaders from nine countries.

• This is despite cloud security being "more robust and more reliable than on-premise security,” said Marc Clark, head of cloud strategy at Teradata, who spoke at Teradata Universe in France this week, CIO.com reports. 

• Rather than security, Clark said companies should be more concerned about how they move data from on-prem data centers to public cloud providers. "How do you move a petabyte of data to the cloud? You don't. Because a petabyte of data is hard to move to the cloud," Clark said.

Dive Insight:

For larger data sets, such as found in analytics applications, the amount of data stored is too large to upload virtually. Cloud companies are therefore getting more involved in helping customers solve this problem.

Amazon Web Services has introduced a few solutions to help companies move data. AWS’ Snowball Edge box is used to transfer data from data centers to the AWS cloud, 100 terabytes at a time. For the migration of larger workloads, AWS has a long-haul truck that can move up to 100 petabytes of data at a time. 

Last month, Google announced this week the acquisition of AppBridge, a company that helps businesses move their on-premise data to Google Drive. It’s all part of a strategy to eliminate barriers and make it easy for companies to move to the cloud.