2015 Bitglass Cloud Security Report : Security Still Cloud's Achilles Heel

By Christopher Hines, Product Marketing Manager, Bitglass

The cloud. Companies want it, but can they secure it? Moving to cloud applications like Salesforce, Office 365 and Box, can be beneficial for business but companies must first answer the question of security.

Today we announced the findings from the 2015 Bitglass Cloud Security Report. The report was the result of a survey done with 1,010 IT securers working across the globe.

This report helps provide insight into the level of cloud adoption today, industry trends, top cloud security risks and the cloud security solutions that IT securers are leveraging. So, let’s dig into some of the findings.

Delivering on the hype?….Yes and No

The report confirmed that the hype behind cloud adoption has been proven true. Companies are seeing benefits including increased flexibility, greater availability and low costs since moving to the cloud. Interestingly, when it comes to security and compliance, the results showed that cloud is falling short. In fact, 90% of organizations have security concerns! Insider threats > outsider cyber hackers We found that the majority of concerns that companies have are not of malware and hacking from outside entities. Instead, companies are most concerned about their employees and view them as the weakest link in the security chain. Of the 1,010 respondents, 63% said that unauthorized access to sensitive company data was the number one greatest risk to their organization. Hijacking of accounts (61%) and malicious insiders (43%) made up the rest of the top 3 risks to company data. With the amount of corporate data that is now flowing up into cloud apps and downloaded down to mobile devices, it makes sense why employee represent the greatest risk to organizations. Companies must be able to control the flow of their data. How companies are approaching security 65% of respondents said that data encryption topped the list of the most effective security technology for data protection. It’s also important to note that due to the proliferation of data that is now moving outside of the firewall, 68% of companies believe that a perimeter-based approach to security is no longer the correct strategy for securing data. I encourage you to take a deeper look into the data within the report and see what your peers have to say when it comes to our industry’s greatest concern. Securing the cloud.