Vormetric has revealed that 60% of U.S. enterprises are storing sensitive data in the cloud, which suggests that organisations have now fully embraced cloud storage as a means to store all data.
The "Cloud and Big Data edition of the 2015 Vormetric Insider Threat Report" also revealed that the use of SaaS applications is likely behind the amount of sensitive data in the cloud.
As organisations increasingly adopt on-line HR, ERP, accounting, email and various other SaaS tools, the rise in sensitive data in the cloud is only likely to rise.
According to the report, the main concerns for organisations are data protection for applications in file sharing and storage services like Box and AWS S3.
The report found it surprising that despite concerns around sensitive data stored within SaaS, organisations were still opting to store sensitive data in this way.
The U.S. is leading the way when it comes to organisations which are using SaaS applications with sensitive data, with 62% versus 57% globally.
It was found that U.S. organisations were more concerned than international respondents when it came to data residency, vulnerabilities from shared infrastructure and privileged user abuse at the cloud provider.
This rate was found to be between 20% and 30% higher in the U.S. than international.
People surveyed were asked, "Which of the following locations are at the greatest risk for loss of sensitive data in your organisation?", with the results highlighting that cloud is perceived as the biggest risk environment that enterprises use for sensitive data.
The U.S. believed this was the biggest threat for 46% and in Germany 49%.
Mobile was seen as the second highest perceived area of risk, due to the lack of security control strategy in place.
