Yet another survey on cloud adoption has highlighted the lax attitude of enterprises towards data security.

HyTrust Inc., in its 2016 HyTrust Cloud Adoption Survey, shows that 28 percent of companies that have deployed data, applications and workloads onto the public cloud have done nothing to encrypt their data and other workloads. The workload security vendor, which quizzed more than 400 executives attending the recent VMworld conference, added that a growing number of enterprises are moving sensitive data to multi-cloud environments, which means more data is vulnerable to potential security breaches.

HyTrust’s survey suggests that many enterprises are being careless towards data security in the public cloud, even as security concerns continue to grow. Those concerns were evidenced by HyTrust’s finding that 47 percent of companies had avoided moving to the public cloud due to worries about security.

In the most recent survey, HyTrust found that 44 percent of those enterprises which have moved to the cloud are encrypting data using their provider’s own security offerings, while 28 percent using their own approach. However, 28 percent of enterprises do neither, apparently simply preferring to hope that nothing bad will happen.

The survey also looked at how cloud rollouts are being tackled by different industries, including financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and retail. HyTrust said that 60 percent of respondents will adopt a multi-cloud model focused on multiple cloud vendors.

Regarding vendor choice, HyTrust’s findings were more or less in line with the general consensus, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) the preferred vendor for 26 percent of companies, followed by Microsoft Azure (21 percent). Some 30 percent of multi-cloud adopters said they were using a combination of AWS and Azure, while a third of respondents indicated they had shifted applications, data and workloads to AWS, Azure and VMware Inc.’s vCloud Air service.

Besides security worries, 28 percent of organizations cited the cost of the cloud, while another 21 percent said reliability issues were preventing them from switching.

HyTrust said in a statement its survey shows that the trend towards “a multi-cloud, multi-vendor, hybrid deployment” is already established, and took the opportunity to make a pitch for “multi-cloud workload security.”

The vendor said that despite the growing awareness of cloud security issues, there are still many “obvious gaps including many who are not yet encrypting their cloud workloads, as well as those who are running encrypting solutions where they are not the only ones holding the encryption keys.”

Image credit: markusspiske via pixabay