Cloud security and adoption trends

CloudPassage issued a survey to more than 250,000 members of LinkedIn’s Information Security Group and represents a broad cross section of company sizes, cloud adoption maturity and experiences.

Cloud adoption is increasing quickly and organizations are looking to reduce IT cost, increase agility and better support business functions. However, this report clearly showcases a prevailing opinion among security professionals; that protecting cloud-based applications and systems remains a major concern and a critical barrier to faster adoption of cloud infrastructure.

Key findings from the survey include:

• 71% of all respondents are investing in cloud infrastructure
• 77% of respondents are investing in public cloud services
• 71% are investing in hybrid (mixed public and private) cloud models, making it the leading model for deploying cloud infrastructure
• Despite this, security is still the biggest perceived barrier to further cloud computing adoption, with 90% of respondents indicating they have moderate to severe security concerns regarding their cloud deployments
• 65% of respondents say that moving security focus to the workload, away from the perimeter, is at least somewhat effective
• Many companies are now storing sensitive data in cloud environments
• The number one method cited that will close the security gap for cloud computing is the ability to enforce consistent, continuous security policies.

“This cloud survey represents a first glimpse into exactly what types of concerns are keeping security professionals up at night,” said Holger Schulze, group founder of the Information Security Community on LinkedIn. “It’s clear from the survey results that a vast majority of organizations are investing aggressively in cloud computing technologies, while at the same time, have not figured out the complete security model to give them continuous, consistent protection in these environments.”