14 DAY TRIAL // CA Technologies and the Ponemon Institute have performed a study on cloud security to see if practices have improved over the past couple of years. A similar study was done in 2010.
Compared to the results of the 2010 study, it appears organizations have improved their practices. However, there are still some concerns regarding the awareness of cloud services being used within the organization.
Companies are more confident in the security of cloud computing than they were three years ago, and many of them have put better practices in place. On the other hand, there’s still room for progress, since only around 50% of the subjects provided positive responses.
“While cloud computing is still one of the most disruptive and promising trends of the past decade, our study shows that cloud security struggles to get past a grade of 50 percent when it comes to best practices, including the percentage of organizations that say they engage their security teams in determining the use of cloud services,” said CA’s Mike Denning.
“We believe that organizations can do better and gain the benefits of cloud computing by reducing risk and achieving that desired balance of protection and business enablement.”
In addition, there seem to be some conflicting views regarding who is most responsible for cloud security.
The figures show that 36% of organizations expect their cloud service providers to be responsible for the security of SaaS applications. 31% believe company end-users should be responsible, while only 8% are saying the IT security department should be responsible.
Experts believe that these discrepancies might lead to gaps in security processes and governance.
The numbers from the study also highlight the fact that 64% of respondents prefer hybrid identity and access management (IAM) security solutions that support both cloud-based and on-premise applications.
The complete “Security of Cloud Computing Users 2013,” study is available here.
An infographic summing up the results is available here.