The IT Nerd

• Cloud Investment Trends: A majority of organizations are planning on investing in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) (81 per cent), closely followed by security-as-a-service (79 per cent), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) (69 per cent), and lastly software-as-a-service (SaaS) (60 per cent).
• Security and Compliance: A majority of respondents (72 per cent) list compliance as the primary concern across all types of cloud deployments, and only 13 per cent of respondents noted knowing whether or not their organizations stored sensitive data in the cloud.
• Security Risks and the Cloud: Perception and Reality: More than 1 in 5 respondents expressed their main concern around using SaaS is having a data security incident, and correspondingly, data breaches were a top concern for IaaS and private clouds. However, results found that less than a quarter (23 per cent) of enterprises are aware of data breaches with their cloud service providers.
• The C-Suite Blind Spot: High-profile data breaches with major financial and reputational consequences have made data security a top-of-mind concern for C-level executives, however many respondents feel there is still a need for more education and increased awareness and understanding of risks associated with storing sensitive data in the cloud. Only one-third (34 per cent) of respondents feel senior management in their organization fully understand the security implications of the cloud.
• Shadow IT, Risk and Opportunity: Despite IT departments’ activity to cull shadow IT activity, 52 per cent of the lines of business still expect IT to secure their unauthorized department-sourced cloud services. This lack of visibility into cloud usage due to shadow IT appears to be causing IT departments concern when it comes to security, with a majority (58 per cent) of respondents surveyed in Orchestrating Security in the Cloud noting that shadow IT has a negative impact on their ability to keep cloud services secure.
• Security Investment: Cloud security investment varies in priorities across the different types of cloud deployment, with the top security technologies leveraged by respondents being email protection (43 per cent), Web protection (41 per cent), anti-malware (38 per cent), firewall (37 per cent), encryption and key management (34 per cent), and data loss prevention (31 per cent).

These are just some of the Canadian-specific findings to come out of a recent global report titled, Blue Skies Ahead? The State of Cloud Adoption. Intel Security released the report last week.

Methodology

The survey, conducted by Vanson Bourne, interviewed 1,200 IT decision makers with influence over their organization’s cloud security in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Australia, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States (350 interviews in the U.S., 150 interviews in Spain and the U.K., and 100 interviews in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France and Germany). Respondents were from a range of organizations with 251-500 employees to those with more than 5,000 employees.

Questionnaire surveys, such as the one conducted by Vanson Bourne and Intel Security, collect data at a single point in time and are limited in their ability to collect complex and nuanced responses. Furthermore, they are not independently able to support long-term conclusions.