Industries across the board are increasingly migrating workloads to public clouds, but security concerns are still holding back much wider adoption, according to a new survey by Barracuda Networks Inc.

Barracuda’s survey of 300 information technology decision-makers from various sizes of organizations found that 44 percent of respondents are using public cloud-based infrastructure as a service offerings. However, Barracuda said its survey results indicate that percentage will double within the next five years.

The main obstacle holding back further adoption of cloud infrastructure is ongoing security concerns, cited by 74 percent of information technology decision makers. One possible reason for this is that companies largely misunderstand that there’s a “shared responsibility” when it comes to cloud security.

Barracuda found that 77 percent of IT decision-makers believe that public cloud providers should be wholly responsible for securing customer’s cloud-based data, while 68 percent believe they should also take responsibility for application security too. Based on this belief, some 30 percent of organizations have not added any additional security layers to their cloud deployments, the survey found.

“This survey confirms what we are hearing from customers and partners; security still remains a key concern for organizations evaluating public cloud, and there’s confusion over where their part of the shared responsibility model begins and ends,” Tim Jefferson, vice president of public cloud at Barracuda, said in a statement.

Jefferson said that most organizations understood that their data is actually more secure in public cloud environments than it is in on-premises deployments because cloud providers have significant amounts of money to invest in better security tools. “However, the organizations benefiting most from public cloud are those that understand that their public cloud provider is not responsible for securing data or applications,” he added.

Image: Blue Coat Photos/Flickr