The driving force of cloud security investments

A new Netwrix report supplements the 2018 Netwrix Cloud Security Report, unveiling survey findings specific to various industries and regions. Overall, 853 organizations shared their feedback for the survey, conducted in November 2017. All organizations are public or hybrid cloud users.

Key findings

• 80% of technology & IT organizations get support from top management for cloud security initiatives – more than any other industry surveyed.
• Malware is most feared by health care organizations (61%) and government entities (60%), though it is the number two concern for all industries surveyed.
• 62% of educational institutions perceive their own employees to be the biggest threat to cloud security, the largest share among the industries surveyed. This result is explained by the education sector also having the lowest visibility into user activity in the cloud: Only 18% of the institutions are completely aware of their IT staff activity and just 7% have complete understanding of business user activity.
• Financial organizations outdo other industries when it comes to visibility into IT staff activity: 47% of them claim to have complete visibility. They are also the most active cloud users; 96% of financial organizations already store sensitive data there.
• The retail & wholesale sector sees the biggest threat as hackers (48%), rather than employees (27%). This also is the only industry that cited DoS attacks as one of their major concerns.
• Organizations from JAPAC are more enthusiastic about broader cloud adoption (54%) and adopting a cloud-first approach (44%) than companies in other regions.
• To strengthen IT security, the majority of North-American (57%) and European (57%) organizations are planning to improve employee training, while the most popular measure planned by Asian companies is the purchase of vendor security solutions (49%).

“Regardless of how long organizations have used the cloud, how much sensitive data they entrust to cloud providers and how regulated their industries are, they share the same cloud security concerns. Most of these concerns are directly attributed to human factors and stem from insufficient awareness about activity in the cloud environment. The majority of organizations across all the industries and regions surveyed believe in the power of staff training and security policy enforcement as two top measures to improve cloud security. However, these measures will work only if you have complete visibility into user activity in the cloud,” said Michael Fimin, CEO of Netwrix.