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Eight out of 10 businesses already use cloud services to store some data. Many of these businesses would use cloud even more if certain changes were made to cloud provisioning, according to a recent survey of 818 IT decision makers sponsored by Vormetric, an enterprise data security vendor.
The top four changes IT decision makers want are encryption of data with enterprise key control on their premises (55 percent); encryption of data within a service provider’s infrastructure (52 percent; service level commitments and liability terms for a data breach (52 percent) and explicit security descriptions and compliance commitments (48 percent).
“Enterprises need security options that offer both better visibility and higher levels of service commitments from cloud providers. Survey results show enterprises are willing to adopt more cloud services provided their list of business needs are met,” Derek Tumulak, vice president of product management for Vormetric, told eWEEK. “. Cloud providers that commit to address these business concerns are poised to capture increased enterprise business spend for more secure cloud services offers.”
The survey also found the top three storage environments, measured by volume of corporate data held, are internally managed databases (49 percent); file servers (39 percent) and in third place, the cloud (30 percent).
Of the 80 percent of businesses now using the cloud, 54 percent said they keep sensitive company information there.
The levels of concern about cloud and big data operations and software-as- a -service (SaaS) applications used to support those operations vary across global markets, according to survey results.
Based on data volumes held, the markets that show the most concern and rate the cloud as being the greatest risk to the protection of sensitive data are the U.S. (46 percent) and Germany (49 percent).
“In the near future, we expect U.S. organizations to continue their bullish adoption of cloud technology – while also continuing to express concern over data security,” Tumulak said. “At the same time, cloud providers are getting the message – it’s pay to play. If they want enterprise business, or to continue with enterprise business, they have to adjust their offerings to meet enterprise needs. We’ve already seen many IaaS and SaaS providers extending their security policies and controls, and we expect the rate of expansion of those offering higher levels of security to accelerate.”