CipherCloud has announced the results of a cloud 'health check' survey. With the one year anniversary of the PRISM revelations approaching, CipherCloud gauged the attitudes and insights of attendees at the recent Infosecurity Europe 2014 event. The large number of surveillance disclosures has prompted EU regulatory discussions around balkanizing the cloud and even suspending the established practice of safe harbor.
To dig into these issues, the survey gauged respondents’ attitudes towards the effect of industry developments, such as surveillance and breaches, as well as the protection technologies in use at their organisations. Most notably, responses highlighted undaunted enthusiasm to continue cloud projects, despite the risks and the web of privacy regulations across regions and industries. This may be explained by the strong confidence that the majority of respondents place in the ability of cloud data security and visibility solutions to protect enterprise data from unauthorised access.
Top line survey findings:
· Cloud Adoption – 11 per cent of respondents indicated that Heartbleed, breaches and Snowden have significantly altered their cloud adoption plans, but 56 per cent said that these issues had little impact on their plans.
· Cloud Application Visibility – only 15 per cent expressed a high level of confidence in their organisations’ level of visibility into all cloud applications in use by their employees.
· Data Control – nearly half (43 per cent) of respondents noted no enterprise control or visibility into whether employees were putting sensitive data into the cloud, while 28 per cent expressed strong confidence in their data control capabilities.
· Data Protection – a majority of 64 per cent said that protecting their cloud data was very important. While interestingly 7 per cent still consider data protection an afterthought.
· Encryption – 55 per cent, more than half, responded that they see high value in encrypting their cloud data to protect it from potential breaches and or third party surveillance.
“Security and privacy risks have followed sensitive data into the cloud, making cloud information protection a new imperative for enterprises,” said Bob West, Chief Trust Officer at CipherCloud. “It is no longer practical to leave sensitive data not protected. The smart recourse is proactive defence with strong encryption as the fail-safe to protect data in the worst case scenario of a breach.”
