Survey: Nearly Half Of Cloud Services Users Have Had A Breach In The Past Year

Nearly half of IT executives have reported a security lapse or issue with their cloud services provider within the past 12 months, according to a new survey.

The survey by Trend Micro, which polled 1,200 decision makers in the U.S., U.K., Germany, India, Canada, and Japan, found that slightly more than 10 percent of the respondents currently have cloud computing projects in production, and close to half are either implementing or piloting new cloud applications.

Yet many respondents seemed unsure about what cloud computing services are. When presented with a list of cloud computing services, 93 percent of the respondents said they are currently working with at least one of them. And yet 7 percent of the same respondents said their company has no plans to deploy any cloud computing service.

"Based on our data, we see about five times more cloud applications coming online in the next few years, yet 43 percent of existing cloud users had a security incident last year," says Dave Asprey, vice president of cloud security at Trend Micro. "On top of that, some respondents didn't even know they were using the cloud, much less securing it."

While security is still the major hindrance toward cloud adoption, more enterprises are now perceiving performance and availability of cloud services to be of near-equal consideration. According to the survey, the top barriers respondents see in adopting cloud computing services are concerns over security of data or cloud infrastructure (50 percent) and performance and availability of cloud service (48 percent).

When it comes to safeguarding sensitive data stored in the cloud, enterprises turn to encryption. Eighty-five percent of respondents said they encrypt data stored in the cloud. And before taking the plunge into cloud adoption, more than half of survey respondents said they would be more likely to consider a cloud provider if encrypted data storage were included in the offering.

Have a comment on this story? Please click "Comment" below. If you'd like to contact Dark Reading's editors directly, send us a message.