IT priorities are changing: Cloud-first strategy to rise

Bitglass conducted an survey of nearly 100 IT leaders attending the Gartner Symposium IT Expo in Orlando, Fla. to better understand their top challenges for 2016 and how they plan to address them.

Among the notable findings, 55 percent of CIOs stated that their organizations will adopt a cloud-first strategy and nearly 90 percent plan on increasing spending on security for their organization in 2016.

“Progressive CIOs understand the powerful advantages that a cloud-first, security-now strategy can bring to their business,” said Nat Kausik, CEO, Bitglass. “As we get ready to turn the page on a year plagued by epic data breaches and other nefarious activity, we believe that the increased focus on cloud and on security by IT leaders is encouraging for 2016 and beyond.”

Key findings:

• 55 percent of CIOs characterized their organization’s 2016 application strategy as “cloud-first”
• 34 percent of respondents expect to increase spending on cloud security by more than 20 percent in 2016. Overall, 87 percent will increase security spend in 2016.
• 50 percent of survey respondents reported cost savings in 2015 as a result of their SaaS applications
• Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) adoption is rising fast, with 55 percent of CIOs planning to deploy a CASB in the future
• 36 percent of executives felt controlling downloads to external devices was the largest cloud security challenge heading into 2016, followed by evaluating security of cloud app vendors (24 percent) and external sharing (21 percent). Shadow IT, a major concern from prior years is now a top concern for only 13 percent of CIOs.

“By 2020, 85% of large enterprises will use a cloud access security broker product for their cloud services, which is up from fewer than 5% today,” according to Gartner’s Craig Lawson, Neil MacDonald, and Brian Lowans.