Users worry about cloud computing security

The study, called Security for cloud users, surveyed nearly thousands of cloud-computing users in Europe and the US. Some companies may have adopted cloud computing services without their knowledge, the respondents said. More than 50% of U.S. respondents said their company did not know all the cloud services deployed in the company.

Mike Spinny, a senior privacy analyst at Ponemon Cato, quotes respondents as saying, "Yes, we're not really sure which apps in the cloud are in line with the company's security policy, and we don't know what's going on and what we're dealing with." "This is really worrying because these respondents are responsible for protecting the company's information security," Spinny said.

In addition, IT professionals surveyed are generally concerned about the security of data in cloud computing. 68% of respondents believe that the risk of financial and intellectual property information is too high to be stored outside the corporate data center. The respondents also believed that health records (55%) and credit card information (43%) should not be migrated to cloud-based services.

"This survey shows that users lack confidence in the security of cloud computing," Spinny said. It pros say they don't know whether specific vendors are properly approved, and if they don't know what apps they're running, they will feel unable to control their computing environment and thus be unable to build confidence in cloud computing. ”

The survey found that many companies lacked knowledge of who should ultimately be responsible for ensuring the security of data in the cloud computing environment. 27% of U.S. respondents and 38% of European respondents said their company's security leaders should be responsible for the security of the data. Only 38% of American IT professionals say their companies proactively assess whether information is too sensitive to be stored in a cloud server.

Although European IT professionals are generally more optimistic about the security of cloud computing than their American peers, the proportion of companies that use cloud-based services entirely is relatively low.

Surveys show that only a handful of companies use infrastructure as a service (infrastructure as a Service,iaas) or platform as a service (Platform as a Service,paas), These cloud services are typically shared by managed service providers in a place outside the corporate data center to share infrastructure and computing power. Surveys show that most cloud-based service providers offer software as a service (Software as a Service,saas). Of the American IT professionals surveyed, 67% said their company was using SaaS, while only 35% said the company was using PAAs. European IT professionals have reacted similarly to this issue.

Lina Liberti, marketing vice president of Spinny and CA security Management, expects the company to migrate more fully to cloud computing over time to reduce costs and improve efficiency. Liberti points out that companies need to become more familiar with cloud-based services, and they will eventually realize that many of the security technologies used in physical environments can also be used in cloud computing environments. In many cases, the identity management, log management, data encryption, and network security systems currently in use can be applied to cloud computing environments to mitigate risk.

"We will witness the natural evolution that is taking place in the business," Liberti said. A few years ago IT pros didn't think of migrating sensitive data from a host to a distributed server environment. And over time, it all became reality. Now we will see the same progress in the cloud computing world. ”