Small and mid-sized businesses, or SMBs, use free cloud storage to back up and archive company files, but the more sensitive the data—such as customer credit card data—the less likely businesses are to use free versions. That’s one finding from a recent survey of businesses to determine their use of cloud-based data storage. Overall, 25% of respondents use free versions of cloud storage.
A report based on the survey, titled “Cloud Storage and Security: The Rundown,” showed 66% of all respondents use cloud storage for backing up and archiving files and 57% of 74 respondents using free cloud storage did so as well.
As the data became more sensitive the use of free cloud storage declined. For example, the second-most common data in cloud storage was company operations files, noted by 55% of all respondents and 38% of those using free storage, according to the study conducted by Clutch, a provider of B2B research.
Similarly, company financial records are kept in cloud storage by 44% of respondents and by 28% of those using free storage sources.
Clutch surveyed 293 SMBs that use at least one cloud storage platform. 51% work at companies with 50-500 employees. Respondents worked at companies in more than 10 industries, including information technology, health care and life sciences, business services, education and manufacturing.
23% of all respondents used cloud storage for files containing medical data, compared with 14% of those using free storage. And while 28% of all respondents used cloud storage for customer credit card and/or banking information, only 11% of those using free cloud storage did so.
Free cloud storage can work for certain types of businesses, said Mark Estes, regional director of sales at Qubole, a self-service platform provider for data analytics. “It really depends on what these people are trying to do. Is it literally just trying to back up data somewhere else reliably, and they only have so much data? Then the free version will probably work. If you’re trying to mimic what used to be an enterprise storage platform, then they’ll end up in the paid versions–it gets them more storage and all the enterprise-related features they’ll probably want.”
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