Security remains the seemingly eternal bugbear when it comes to reasons for not adopting Cloud Computing and a tranche of surveys published in recent weeks suggests that this is not about to change.
According to the 2012 Global State of Information Security Survey by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, some 25% of business leaders globally reckon that Cloud technologies expose them to additional vulnerabilities.
More than four out of ten respondents report that their organisation uses Cloud Computing - 69% for software-as-a-service (SaaS) , 47% for infrastructure-as-a-service (iaaS) and 33% for platform-as-a-service (PaaS).
Meanwhile according to Ernst & Young’s 14th annual Global Information Security Survey, Cloud Computing is the top security funding priority for the next year with 61% of 1700 respondents using or considering the use of Cloud Computing services within the next year.
Almost half (48%) of respondents listed Cloud implementation as a difficult or very difficult challenge, and more than half have not implemented any controls to mitigate the risks associated with Cloud Computing.
The most frequently taken measure is stronger oversight of the contract management process with Cloud providers, but this was still only cited by around one fifth of respondents.
Finally in a poll by Ponemon Institute of 682 IT executives, 52% of respondents rate their organisations' overall management of Cloud server security as fair (27%) and poor (25%).
Some 79% believe that being able to efficiently manage security in the Cloud is just as important as Cloud security itself. But 36% of respondents admitted that their organisations cannot manage access or generate reports efficiently; and 29% manage access through the Cloud provider's tools but cannot see the access reports.
Ponemon has also found that less than one third of respondents said their organisations encrypt data and/or files in the Cloud. Data in IaaS Cloud environments is perceived as a greater security risk than SaaS which is considered by both groups to be more secure.
All in all, it’s just not getting much better out there in the Cloud….
