There are approximately 26.5 million businesses in the United States, and a good portion of them utilize the cloud for various aspects of their companies. However, over half of those businesses utilizing the cloud are experiencing security issues.
Approximately 59% of organizations surveyed reported cloud security incidents related to unsolicited external sharing, and 47% reported incidents regarding access from unauthorized devices, according to the Mitigating Risks For Cloud Applications, a survey of 176 information security professionals conducted by the Cloud Security Alliance and Bitglass.
In addition, the report also details that survey respondents reported that cloud data synced to lost/stolen devices, employees credential compromise, and malicious insiders were problems. However, those issues received less than a third of votes.
The report honed in on the software-as-a-service segment of the cloud market, which continues to steadily grow.
This comes as a result of companies realizing that SaaS apps can be more secure than on premise-based business and office productivity apps.
Despite all of the security issues, though, the cloud still topped SurePayroll’s third annual favorite tech tools survey.
While last year’s winner was Dropbox, the cloud beat out all of the competition by a fairly large margin for 2016.
One company, however, has been claimed the title of king of cloud computing: Amazon.
Amazon delivers “many times the aggregate size of all other providers in the market,” said research firm Gartner. It also dominates when it comes to holding corporate customer data, according to another report by Gartner.
Fortunately, Amazon’s size has nothing to do with the security issues cloud users have been facing lately.
Users are more concerned with a lack of regulation and insurance that cloud users will obey and enforce said regulations.
“If you only have visibility into one application, you don’t have a sense of what is happening across the organization,” said Salim Hafid, product manager with Bitglass, a provider of cloud access security broker technology (CASB).
Gartner predicts that by 2020, 85% of large enterprises will use a cloud access security broker solution for their cloud services to remedy the issue.
“SaaS is important but it is equally important that enterprises when looking at cloud adoption take a look at their entire area of cloud usage,” said Ganesh Kirti, chief technology officer with Palerra.