Survey Highlights Need For Better Cloud Security And Performance Monitoring

PRESS RELEASE

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – March 21, 2013 – AccelOps, Inc., the leader in integrated Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), performance and availability monitoring software for on-premise and cloud-based data centers, announced findings from its recent survey of 176 IT security professionals conducted online and at the RSA Conference 2013. While 65% of respondents' organizations are using cloud services today, only 46% have moved mission-critical applications and data outside the enterprise. Significant inhibitors remain in ensuring effective cloud security and 39% of respondents believe that their existing SIEM and infrastructure monitoring tools are not acceptable to support their cloud security and regulatory compliance requirements.

Bring Your Own Device (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% 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."

Unsurprisingly, the survey shows that the responsibility for cloud security remains overwhelmingly with the internal IT staff at 78% and only 13% of those surveyed hold their Managed Service Providers (MSPs) responsible for cloud security. While 51% 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% 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.

Summary of findings:

• 65% of respondents said their organizations use cloud services for mission-critical applications and data. Of those, 29% are using hybrid clouds and 17% have public cloud services.

• 39% of respondents rate their organizations' ability to ensure cloud security and regulatory compliance using their existing SIEM and infrastructure monitoring tools as inadequate or fair and only 29% rate them as good or excellent.

• 51% are extremely or moderately satisfied with the SLAs their cloud service providers offer.

• 78% of organizations retain responsibility for cloud security using internal IT staff.

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