Nearly one in every four employees knowingly or unknowingly violates corporate data security policy in cloud applications, thereby exposing organisations to cyber attacks.
A study by cloud security company CloudLock found that each organisation has faced an average 4,000 instances where employees exposed credentials.
The study found that usernames and passwords were exposed which were either accessible across the entire company, externally, or, in the most severe cases, publicly.
CloudLock director of customer insights and analytics Ayse Kaya Firat said, "The growth of the cloud and the corresponding expansion of the perimeter is staggering.
"It creates a monumental challenge for IT professionals looking to protect their enterprises from emerging cloud cyberattacks all while staying out of the way of users and allowing them to embrace the collaboration opportunities it provides."
CloudLock analysed more than 750 million files, 77,500 apps and six million users in the cloud, which found that on an average 1.2 million files are stored in the cloud which is 10 times the volume of files stored in public cloud applications compared to last year.
The study also revealed that external collaboration through public cloud applications has quadrupled over the previous year, while 70% of cloud-based external collaboration is done through non-corporate entities.
Third party cloud application has soared 300% last year with each organisation now using an average of 475 unique third-party cloud applications.
During the analysis, the company found more than 77,500 third-party apps with more than 2.5 million installs in 2015 while more than 50% of the third-party apps are banned due to security-related concerns.
Among those organisations studied, organisations have an average of 100,000 files which contain sensitive information within public cloud applications.
