Cloud is now a fully fledged part of the IT strategy for organizations, regardless of their size, industry or geographical distribution. Main reasons for organizations to move to the cloud are scalability, better availability, cost savings and flexibility in resource utilization. Along with this benefits there are lot of challenges and concerns regarding cloud security. In this year’s Cloud Security Survey we were interested to learn about organizations’ concerns regarding cloud security and their readiness to embrace the cloud.
Cloud technology perception
The hype surrounding the cloud is still there, along with discussions and disagreements about real and potential issues of the cloud, its impact on data security and its benefits for businesses. However, the cloud is here to stay, so the IT community will have to find a balance between business benefits and IT challenges. In 2016, the security and privacy of data and systems remains the top concern about cloud technology for organizations worldwide.
The top three security concerns associated with the cloud are unauthorized access (69%), malware (37%) and denial of service (34%).
State of cloud security
While cloud providers continue to invest in security and may provide security measures that are unachievable in-house, almost half of the respondents (44%) agree that cloud providers offer adequate security controls. Almost a quarter (23%) disagree with the statement and a third (33%) are not sure whether or not the provided controls are adequate for today’s threats.
Cloud technology benefits
In the last part of the survey we take a closer look at the real benefits organizations gain with cloud adoption and reveal if they are ready for a more complete transition to the cloud. We asked cloud users to list the top five benefits they managed to gain with cloud adoption. Flexibility in resource utilization is the most popular advantage (68%), followed by higher availability of systems (60%), better scalability (60%), better system performance (38%) and faster service implementation (29%). Substantial improvement of security was mentioned among the top benefits by 16% of cloud users. Despite the fact that the cloud has a positive impact on IT infrastructure both in terms of security and operations, the absolute majority (86%) of cloud users are not ready for a big cloud move.
More facts and highlights from the Netwrix 2016 Cloud Security Survey you can find on the infographics below:
Click Cloud Security Survey to download the full survey report in PDF.
