AccelOps has released its 2013 Cloud Security Survey

Mar 22, 2013 21:21 GMT  ·  By

During the last RSA Conference, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), performance and availability monitoring software provider AccelOps conducted a study to find out what was stopping organizations from migrating their critical applications and data to the cloud.

It turns out that of the 176 IT security professionals that have taken part in the survey, 65% said their organizations used cloud services. However, only 46% have moved critical applications and data.

The figures also show that 39% of respondents believe that their existing SIEM and infrastructure monitoring solutions are not acceptable to support cloud security and regulatory compliance requirements. On the other hand, 29% of them say their current solutions are good or excellent.

So what are the biggest issues when it comes to cloud security?

Most IT security experts have named the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiative. BYOD is followed by data control, potential data loss, enforcing security policies, network visibility, log data analysis in real time, compliance reporting, vulnerabilities in the hypervisor, and incident response times.

Interestingly, in 78% of cases, internal IT teams are considered responsible for cloud security. 13% of organizations say their Managed Service Providers should take care of security.

“It's a sad indictment of the security industry that, in such a well-established market as SIEM and performance monitoring, 39 percent of those surveyed indicated they could not rely on their existing SIEM and monitoring solutions to ensure cloud security and compliance,” noted Flint Brenton, president and CEO of AccelOps.

“There is much work to be done to ensure that security threats and the risk of data loss associated with cloud environments are minimized,” he added.

“The myriad of cloud services and an ever-changing BYOD landscape means we can no longer simply lock down access to sensitive resources; we have to do a better job of monitoring, correlating and analyzing infrastructure behavior and events to recognize and respond to incidents in real-time.”

The complete AccelOps 2013 Cloud Security Survey is available here.