Security concerns continue to dog the cloud industry

Executives at major North American companies believe conventional network security solutions aren’t enough to protect their cloud computing environments, especially when it comes to visibility into impending cyber attacks.

The CloudPassage survey surveyed high-level security professionals at major North American organizations on their attitudes toward cloud security, key adoption drivers, and the effectiveness of traditional security solutions in cloud environments.

Chief among the findings was that 80% of respondents don’t think traditional network security tools can adequately protect cloud infrastructure, while at the same time noting that fully 58% of IT services will be based in public, private or hybrid cloud environments in the next 18 months, a dramatic increase over the 43% today.

The survey also notes that cloud adoption continues to grow because agility, efficiency and speed are of paramount importance to enterprises. However, as organizations move workloads from their own servers to virtual infrastructure, they often run into some significant issues.


According to 65% of survey respondents, it takes three months or longer to deploy a new security solution for their cloud infrastructure environment; not only is this lag a huge pain point, it leaves enterprises vulnerable to new threats that may emerge during deployment.

In addition to the findings above:

• 73% of respondents reported that traditional security is difficult to scale in a cloud environment;
• 50% anticipate the majority of their customer data will reside in a cloud environment — and nearly 20% in a public cloud — in the next 18 months;
• 37% are concerned about their ability to meet compliance requirements; and
• The top three concerns about customer data residing in the public cloud are data ownership, location of data, and shared technology.