The cloud is no longer a mystery to today's companies, which capitalize on its benefits to fuel growth, but securing cloud-based data, applications, and infrastructure remains a challenge.
As part of its most recent "Cloud Adoption and Risk Report," researchers with McAfee polled 1,000 enterprise organizations around the world and combined their data with insight from billions of anonymized cloud events across their customer base. Most cloud adopters (87%) report business acceleration, and 52% claim to experience better security. A closer look at the numbers, however, reveals a need to better control information and applications in the cloud.
Only 26% of respondents say they can audit infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) configurations such as open access to storage buckets. One-third say they can control application collaboration settings. Slightly more (36%) can enforce data loss prevention (DLP) in the cloud. More than 35% of businesses with a cloud access security broker (CASB) are more likely to be able to launch new products and speed time to market — but only one-third of respondents use them.
"It's a matter of maturity," says Vittorio Viarengo, vice president of product for McAfee's cloud unit. Two years ago, security was the main obstacle to cloud adoption as companies hesitated to share data with providers. Now, with providers buckling down on security and business decisions accelerating the transition to the cloud, they've grown accustomed to the switch but fail to realize cloud providers don't cover all security. In some ways, they're still responsible.
As researchers point out in the report, the one element of security that cloud providers can't cover for their customers is how their services are actually used, specifically the data that is st ..
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