Adoption rates of basic cloud security tools and practices still far too low

As organizations migrate more of their data and operations to the cloud, they must maintain a robust cybersecurity posture, a Bitglass report reveals.

Each year, Bitglass conducts research on the state of enterprise cloud security in order to identify key trends and common vulnerabilities. This year’s report found that 75 percent of organizations leverage multiple cloud solutions, but only 20 percent have visibility over cross-app anomalous behavior.

With more and more organizations storing sensitive information in the cloud – information like customer data (45 percent), employee data (42 percent) and intellectual property (24 percent) – adopting proper cloud security measures is critical.

Key findings:

• Despite a change in their order, the top priorities from 2018 remained top priorities in 2019; this year, the top three were defending against malware, reaching regulatory compliance and securing major apps in use.
• The use of CASBs for malware protection has increased from 20 percent in 2018 to 31 percent in 2019.
• Access control (52 percent) and anti-malware (46 percent) are the most-used cloud security capabilities. However, these and others – like single sign-on (26 percent) and data loss prevention (20 percent) – are still not deployed often enough.
• Malware has emerged as the most concerning data leakage vector, with 27 percent of respondents citing it as the number one concern for their organization. Conversely, concern about leakage through unsanctioned cloud apps fell from 12 percent in 2018 to 5 percent in 2019, showing that organizations are becoming aware that there are threats greater than shadow IT.
• Cost is the leading concern for organizations evaluating cloud security providers. Other critical concerns include ease of deployment (46 percent), whether the solution is cloud native (45 percent), the ease with which cross-cloud security policies can be enforced (36 percent) and the solution’s ability to integrate with various cloud platforms (36 percent).

“Data is now being stored in more cloud apps and accessed by more devices than ever before,” said Rich Campagna, CMO at Bitglass.

“This report found that 93 percent of respondents are at least moderately concerned about their ability to use the cloud securely, and that the adoption rates of basic cloud security tools and practices are still far too low.

“Many organizations need to rethink their approach to protecting data, as traditional tools for safeguarding data on premises are not capable of protecting data in the cloud.”