BYOD and data protection top concerns with cloud adoption

According to a new AccelOps survey, 65 percent of organizations are using cloud services, while only 46 percent have moved mission-critical applications and data outside the enterprise. Significant inhibitors remain in ensuring effective cloud security and 39 percent of respondents believe that their existing SIEM and infrastructure monitoring tools are not acceptable to support their cloud security and regulatory compliance requirements.

BYOD, data control and potential data loss top the cloud security concerns identified by respondents, closely followed by enforcing security policies and ensuring visibility across both traditional and cloud infrastructures.

Given the inhibitors identified and that less than half of those using cloud services have deployed a hybrid model, there is clearly a need for a single, unified platform that can identify security threats and monitor IT operations across traditional, private and public cloud infrastructures.

“It’s a sad indictment of the security industry that, in such a well-established market as SIEM and performance monitoring, 39 percent of those surveyed indicated they could not rely on their existing SIEM and monitoring solutions to ensure cloud security and compliance,” said Flint Brenton, President and CEO of AccelOps.

“There is much work to be done to ensure that security threats and the risk of data loss associated with cloud environments are minimized. The myriad of cloud services and an ever-changing BYOD landscape means we can no longer simply lock down access to sensitive resources; we have to do a better job of monitoring, correlating and analyzing infrastructure behavior and events to recognize and respond to incidents in real-time,” Brenton added.

Unsurprisingly, the survey shows that the responsibility for cloud security remains overwhelmingly with the internal IT staff at 78 percent and only 13 percent of those surveyed hold their Managed Service Providers (MSPs) responsible for cloud security. While 51 percent of respondents indicated that they are moderately to extremely satisfied with the Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) offered around security and access control, a surprising 41 percent indicated they were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with their SLAs.

The survey confirms that organizations must retain ownership and responsibility for their own data, irrespective of the underlying security and processes implemented by the cloud service provider. Accordingly, cloud service providers and their customers need better visibility into cloud resources and a common view of cloud service performance and availability against SLAs to improve customer satisfaction.

In priority order, the issues identified as the greatest inhibitors to effective cloud security are:

1. BYOD
2. Data control
3. Potential data loss
4. Enforcing security policies
5. Visibility across all infrastructure resources, traditional and cloud
6. Real-time analysis of log data
7. Compliance reporting
8. Hypervisor vulnerabilities
9. Rapid incident response.

“The promise of cloud computing is to improve agility and deliver greater efficiencies and cost savings,” Brenton said. “However, unless risk can be managed and data secured effectively, organizations will not fully benefit from the advantages of the cloud.”

The complete report is available here.