93% of businesses are worried about public cloud security

Bitglass released a report which uncovers whether organizations are properly equipped to defend themselves in the cloud. IT and security professionals were surveyed to understand their top security concerns and identify the actions that enterprises are taking to protect data in the cloud.

Orgs struggling to use cloud-based resources safely

93% of respondents were moderately to extremely concerned about the security of the public cloud. The report’s findings suggest that organizations are struggling to use cloud-based resources safely. For example, a mere 31% of organizations use cloud DLP, despite 66% citing data leakage as their top cloud security concern.

Similarly, organizations are unable to maintain visibility into file downloads (45%), file uploads (50%), DLP policy violations (50%), and external sharing (55%) in the cloud.

Many still using legacy tools

The report also found that many still try to use tools like firewalls (44%), network encryption (36%), and network monitoring (26%) to secure the use of the cloud–despite 82% of respondents recognizing that such legacy tools are poorly suited to do so and that they should instead use security capabilities designed for the cloud.

“To address modern cloud security needs, organizations should leverage multi-faceted security platforms that are capable of providing comprehensive and consistent security for any interaction between any device, app, web destination, on-premises resource, or infrastructure,” said Anurag Kahol, CTO at Bitglass.

“According to our research, 79% of organizations already believe it would be helpful to have such a consolidated security platform; now they just need to choose and implement the right one.”