Most enterprises face apprehension over adopting cloud computing,
and with good reason, according to a recent global cloud security
survey conducted by Trend Micro. Nearly half (43 percent) of enterprise
IT decision-makers reported a security lapse or issue with their cloud
provider within the last 12 months.
The global survey of 1,200 United States, UK, Germany, India, Canada and Japan
IT decision-makers uncovers the insecurities and concerns surrounding
their journey to the cloud. It confirmed that, on the whole,
enterprises are moving toward the cloud at a brisk pace and are
initiating a giant multiplicative wave of new deployments. Although
slightly more than 10 percent of the respondents currently have cloud
computing projects in production, close to half are either implementing
or piloting new cloud applications.
Despite cloud computing's growing popularity in most countries,
confusion is still at play among enterprises, some of which don't
recognize what cloud computing services are. When presented with a list
of cloud computing services, 93 percent of the respondents said they
are currently working with at least one of them. And yet, 7 percent of
the same respondents said that their company has no plans to deploy any
cloud computing service – a contradiction.
"Based on our data, we see about five times more cloud applications
coming online in the next few years, yet 43 percent of existing cloud
users had a security incident last year,” said Dave Asprey, vice
president of cloud security for Trend Micro. “On top of that, some
respondents didn't even know they were using the cloud, much less
securing it. Given that many cloud service providers do not adequately
add IT resources to security, the reality is that securing your cloud
environment is not an option, it's a necessity."
While security is still the major hindrance toward cloud adoption,
more enterprises are now perceiving performance and availability of
cloud services to be of near-equal consideration. According to the
survey, the top barriers respondents see in adopting cloud computing
services are concerns over security of data or cloud infrastructure (50
percent) and performance and availability of cloud service (48 percent).
"In the past, security concerns were the primary inhibitors to cloud
adoption. Now, performance and availability have equal influence over
IT decision-makers. As we witnessed in recent data breach incidents,
everything is linked – poor security causes downtime, as well as bad
performance," said Asprey.
When it comes to safeguarding sensitive data stored in the cloud,
enterprises turn to encryption, with 85 percent of respondents saying
they encrypt data stored in the cloud. And before taking the plunge
into cloud adoption, more than half of survey respondents said they
would be more likely to consider a cloud provider if encrypted data
storage were included in the offering. Nevertheless, most commonly used
encryption key management techniques used in the cloud today are
vulnerable.
Cloud Computing 
