As Businesses Move Critical Data to Cloud, Security Risks Abound

More business-critical data is finding a new home in the public cloud, which 72% of organizations believe is more secure than their on-prem data centers. But the cloud is fraught with security challenges: Shadow IT, shared responsibility, and poor visibility put data at risk.

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These insights come from the second annual “Oracle and KPMG Cloud Threat Report 2019,” a deep dive into enterprise cloud security trends. Between 2018 and 2020, researchers predict the number of organizations with more than half of their data in the cloud to increase by a factor of 3.5.

It’s a definite shift from a time in the not-so-distant past when businesses felt the cloud was less secure than their on-prem data centers. Cloud services are no longer nice-to-have elements of IT; they handle core functions related to all aspects of business operations. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, in use among 84% of respondents, help remove cost and complexity of on-prem infrastructure.

Organizations have begun to test business-critical services in the cloud in recent years, Jensen says. Within the past couple of years there has been a “tipping point” at which a large percentage of businesses are diving in. More than 70% of survey respondents say the majority of their cloud-based data is sensitive, an increase from 50% who said the same last year.

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