UPDATED 17:20 EDT / JUNE 10 2016

NEWS

Survey finds growing confidence in public cloud security

The long-held perception that cloud computing is inherently less secure than on-premise computing is finally dissipating, but cybersecurity pros still have plenty of anxiety about the aspect of cloud security they can’t control: end-user behavior.

A new survey of 2,200 security pros by Bitglass Inc., a provider of cloud access brokering services for use outside the firewall, found that only 42 percent of companies have policies restricting the use of unsanctioned cloud applications, despite the fact that 53 percent of respondents said unauthorized app use is their biggest cloud security threat.

The good news for cloud boosters is that 52 percent of respondents said the cloud is at least as secure as their on-premise systems, up from 40 percent in the previous year’s survey. Still, one-third said cloud security still lags their captive systems. There’s broad agreement the tools used to manage security on premise are not sufficient for the cloud, with nearly 60 percent of respondents agreeing with that statement.

Asked about the biggest security threats of cloud computing, 53 percent said unauthorized access, 44 percent said account hijacking, 39 percent cited insecure APIs and one third identified external sharing and posting of confidential data. The four top security concerns were data leakage (49 percent), data privacy (46 percent), confidentiality (42 percent) and regulatory compliance (39 percent).

The most popular cloud security tactics respondents said they use are multi-factor authentication (45 percent), encryption (45 percent), intrusion detection (41 percent) and native application security (40 percent). In a finding that should bring gladness to Bitglass executives, 56 percent said they plan to use cloud access security brokers, which Gartner defines as “on-premises or cloud-based security policy enforcement points placed between cloud service consumers and cloud service providers to combine and interject enterprise security policies as the cloud-based resources are accessed.”

Google should find little cheer about in the survey findings, however. In a question unrelated to security, Bitglass inquired about adoption of various cloud applications. It found a big surge in plans to adopt Microsoft Office 365, from 45 percent of respondents in 2015 to 61 percent this year (see chart above). In contrast, the percentage of respondents planning to increase use of Google apps dropped from 29 percent last year to 26 percent this year. Microsoft Exchange and file-sharing services from Dropbox Inc. and Box Inc. also saw a nice bump in popularity.


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU