Are Cloud Services Taking on a Life of Their Own?

By Nina Seth, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Accellion

A new report from SkyHigh Networks – a company that tracks the use of cloud services for corporate customers – found that cloud services are growing exponentially within enterprises. The findings in the report were based on traffic generated in the cloud by more than 8.3 million users in organizations spanning multiple industries. The research showed that services seem to be multiplying by the minute, deployed faster than IT can even say, “Help!”

Check out these numbers:

• On average, organizations use 759 cloud services – a 33 percent increase since last quarter.
• On average, 24 different file sharing services are being used and 91 different collaboration services.

Managing such an overwhelming quantity of services could only be done by a superhero in disguise. And since most IT administrators aren’t donning capes, they are finding themselves outnumbered by the seemingly unstoppable growth of cloud services. Does it sound ominous? It should, particularly when SkyHigh did additional digging – looking at encryption, retention policies and past security compromises – and discovered that of the 3,571 cloud services in use only 7 percent were “enterprise-ready.”

So, not only are there way too many cloud services available for employees to use on a whim, but the vast majority are not secure. It’s time for enterprises to take inventory of what services are available, and be selective about which ones are being used to share or collaborate on sensitive business information. No company should have 91 collaboration solutions running, or 24 file sharing solutions. Having this many competing solutions running in an organization decreases productivity, as employees try to learn how to use different solutions, and it dramatically increases the risk of data leakage through an unsecure, public-cloud solution.

Take back control of your IT environment by deploying a standardized set of cloud services for file sharing and collaboration that are designed for enterprise use, with robust security capabilities.