A survey by Enterprise Strategy Group (sponsored by Digital Guardian) highlights the data security challenges — including cloud data loss — that are forcing IT organizations to think twice before moving to the cloud.
According to the ESG report, Trends in Cloud Data Security: The Data Perimeter of Hybrid Clouds, 50% of surveyed North American enterprises have lost sensitive data in the public cloud. The problem? Organizations are moving sensitive data to the cloud before they have a strategy for securing it. Forty-four percent of respondents said their on-premises data security is much more mature than their data security for public cloud services.
To make matters worse, users don’t hesitate to put sensitive data in the public cloud. While shadow IT is definitely a problem, 33% of respondents identified that sensitive data upload to IT-led cloud services is a contributor to cloud-based data loss versus 25% who reported use of unsanctioned cloud services.
Other cloud data security challenges identified in the survey include:
* Discovering and classifying identifiable information
* General organizational knowledge of cybersecurity threats
* Trusting employees to follow their organization’s data usage policies
* Detecting data breaches in real time
Cloud providers should note: the vast majority of survey respondents report that data security concerns have impacted their move to the cloud. For 25% of respondents, it’s actually prevented adoption of some public cloud services. For the remaining 62%, data security concerns have slowed adoption of public cloud services.
IT organizations know they need to get data security right if they’re going to continue their move to the cloud — a key part of any digital transformation effort. Eighty-three percent of organizations surveyed by ESG are planning to increase their spending on data security technologies over the next 12 months, and four out of ten respondents expect that increase to be substantial. The technologies survey respondents are considering include cloud workload protection platforms, data discovery and classification, data loss prevention, and data encryption provided by the cloud service provider.
Download the Enterprise Strategy Group report: Trends in Cloud Data Security: The Data Perimeter of Hybrid Clouds