Nearly half of the enterprises face apprehension over adopting cloud computing, with 43% of enterprise IT decision makers reporting security lapse or issue with their cloud provider within the last 12 months, according to a global cloud security survey conducted by Trend Micro.
The global survey of 1200 US, UK, Germany, India, Canada and Japan IT decision makers revealed that, on the whole, enterprises are moving toward the cloud at a brisk pace and are initiating a giant multiplicative wave of new deployments.
Approximately 10% of the respondents currently have cloud computing projects in production, while close to half are either implementing or piloting new cloud applications.
However, the survey highlighted that despite cloud computing’s growing popularity in most countries, confusion is still at play among enterprises, some of whom do not recognise what cloud computing services are.
When presented with a list of cloud computing services, 93% of the respondents said they are currently working with at least one of them while 7% of the same respondents said that their company has no plans to deploy any cloud computing service.
Trend Micro cloud security vice-president Dave Asprey said based on their data, they see about five times more cloud applications coming online in the next few years, yet 43% of existing cloud users had a security incident last year.
"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," Asprey said.
The survey showed that 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%) and performance and availability of cloud service (48%).
In addition, when it comes to safeguarding sensitive data stored in the cloud, 85% of respondents turn to encryption of data stored in the cloud; and 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.
