CipherCloud has revealed that 64% of organisations consider regulatory compliance and information security standards as the top reason for securing data in the cloud.
The migration of data into the cloud is creating a greater need for insight into cloud adoption trends and cloud data security issues. To this end, CipherCloud has released the findings for its, "Cloud Adoption & Risk Report in North America & Europe" report.
The report examines the kinds of data security challenges facing 2000 global companies, and looks to identify what steps are being taken to mitigate these risks in the cloud.
It was found that data encryption (81%) led tokenisation (19%) at enterprises with a cloud security deployment. North American enterprises were found to dedicate efforts on encryption in 85% of cloud security deployments, while European enterprises focused efforts on encryption in 78% of cases.
The leading adopters of cloud data protection were found to be Healthcare with 38%, followed by Finance with 25%. These sectors were found to have the biggest focus on protecting electronic and personally identifiable information.
This is likely due to strict data privacy requirements from governments and sector specific guidelines.
Tokenisation was found to only be favoured by one sector, Government, while other sectors focused their data protection efforts on encryption. This is due to the function preservation and the ability to search, sort and filter data with an encryption system.
Pravin Kothari, founder and CEO, CipherCloud, said: "Organizations are harnessing cloud computing to more effectively compete in the global economy with faster time to market and cost efficiencies."
"At the same time, the headwinds of privacy legislation in North America, Europe, South America and Asia Pacific make the case for data-centric protections in the cloud. Our research indicates that compliance factors are galvanizing organizations, particularly in Healthcare and Finance, to fortify their data defenses in the cloud."
