Interviews

C-Suite blind spot

by Mark Rowe

Chief officers in UK businesses have a blind spot about the risks of storing data in the public cloud, it is claimed in a report by Intel Security on the security issues around the public and private cloud.

Blue Skies Ahead? The State of Cloud Adoption is a global report that’s advocating the need for technology vendors to help businesses, governments and consumers understand the implications surrounding the growing adoption of the cloud. With a majority (77 percent) of participants noting that their organisations trust cloud computing more than a year ago, just 13 percent completely trust public cloud providers to secure sensitive data. These findings highlight improved trust and security are critical to encouraging continued adoption of the cloud.

Raj Samani, chief technology officer, Intel Security EMEA, pictured, said: “This is a new era for cloud providers. We are at the tipping point of investment and adoption, expanding rapidly as trust in cloud computing and cloud providers grows. As we enter a phase of wide-scale adoption of cloud computing to support critical applications and services, the question of trust within the cloud becomes imperative. This will become integral into realising the benefits that cloud computing can truly offer.”

As the technology firm says, the cloud already has a strong impact in the daily lives of many people and businesses, with an ever-growing number of activities performed on digital devices leveraging cloud computing in some way. The increasing use of the cloud is underscored by our survey, which found that in the next 16 months, 80 percent of respondent IT budgets will be dedicated to cloud computing.

Findings

– Cloud investment trends: A majority of organisations are planning on investing in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) (81 percent), closely followed by security-as-a-service (79 percent), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) (69 percent), and lastly software-as-a-service (SaaS) (60 percent).
– Security and compliance: A majority of respondents (72 percent) list compliance as the primary concern across all types of cloud deployments, and only 13 percent of respondents noted knowing whether or not their organisations stored sensitive data in the cloud.
– Security risks and the cloud: perception and reality: More than 1 in 5 respondents expressed their main concern around using SaaS is having a data security incident, and correspondingly, data breaches were a top concern for IaaS and private clouds. On the contrary, results found that less than a quarter (23 percent) of enterprises are aware of data breaches with their cloud service providers.
– The C-Suite blind spot: High-profile data breaches with major financial and reputational consequences have made data security a top-of-mind concern for C-level executives, however many respondents feel there is still a need for more education and increased awareness and understanding of risks associated with storing sensitive data in the cloud. Only one-third (34 percent) of respondents feel senior management in their organisation fully understand the security implications of the cloud.
– Security investment: Cloud security investment varies in priorities across the different types of cloud deployment, with the top security technologies leveraged by respondents being email protection (43 percent), Web protection (41 percent), anti-malware (38 percent), firewall (37 percent), encryption and key management (34 percent), and data loss prevention (31 percent).

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