Why Cloud Security Remains Top Concern of IT Professionals

While most companies are moving to the cloud, security remains a concern. Here’s a look at where IT professionals stand on cloud computing.

When it comes to cloud adoption, IT professionals follow a familiar script. According to the data collected from Netwrix, 66 percent of respondents say they’ll only move to the cloud if they have a “well-defined architecture for security.” IT professionals said companies should also start with pilot testing, understand the needs of end users and ultimately define a cloud migration’s scope before taking the leap.

There’s no surprise here, but the biggest concern among IT professionals moving to the cloud is security. About two-thirds of respondents said that the security and privacy of “sensitive data” is their chief concern, followed by the possibility of the loss of physical control over data. Migration costs ranks lowest in IT professionals concerns.

Losing control over data is a major factor in whether a company will choose a cloud provider, according to Netwrix. For midsize enterprises, 43 percent of respondents said that not being able to get data whenever they need it would be a deal-breaker. That number was at 36 percent for small companies. Disaster recovery effectiveness was another major concern for many IT professionals considering a move to the cloud.

Taking a deeper dive into cloud security, Netwrix found that 69 percent of IT professionals are most concerned with unauthorized access to data stored in the cloud. More than four in 10 respondents say they’re worried about account hijacking, and 36 percent say malware infiltrations can be a concern. Surprisingly, just one in four respondents say “insider misuse” is a worry.

Cloud adoption is still a long way from being ubiquitous, data shows. The greatest number of companies, about one-third of survey respondents, say that they are still in the “discovery and evaluation” phase of cloud adoption. Just 17 percent of respondents say that they have “broad implementation” across their company. The rest of the respondents say that they are either in early trials or starting to implement adoption.

When Netwrix asked midsize companies why they’d move to the cloud, 38 percent of respondents said that it was the flexibility in “resource utilization,” followed closely by having data more easily accessible to employees. The cloud’s cost savings and scalability also proved important. Flexibility was similarly important to large enterprises, while scalability was tops among small companies.

As of this writing, nearly half of companies surveyed (45 percent) say that they are currently using software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications in the cloud. That is followed by a third of companies that are using infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and 22 percent that have opted for platform-as-a-service (PaaS).

Cloud deployment is also a concern among professionals. For now, just 18 percent of companies say that they’re willing to invest in a fully public cloud for their operations, compared with 37 percent of companies that have private clouds. Hybrid clouds are most popular, accounting for 44 percent of all cloud implementations, according to the IT professionals.

In a rather surprising finding, Netwrix discovered that many companies indicate they are willing to pay an additional fee for security guarantees on the data they store in the cloud. In fact, among large enterprises, 77 percent of companies already pay, or would consider paying, for those security guarantees. That figure tops out at 84 percent among small companies and 81 percent for midsize enterprises.

When it’s all said and done, the vast majority of companies are at least planning to move to the cloud. Just 13 percent of companies say that they are not even considering moving at least one of their services to the cloud. This data point indicates that for the minority of companies that indicate they have no plans to use cloud services, not even the cloud’s scalability or cost-savings are enough to get them to change minds about cloud services.