Check Point is releasing the findings of a survey of 200 cybersecurity and IT professionals, showing that security concerns are the biggest barrier to businesses taking up the scalability, flexibility and cost-efficiency benefits of migrations to cloud environments.
Security risks were found to be the biggest factor holding back faster adoption of cloud computing. 93% of respondents said they were ‘very concerned’ (56%) or ‘concerned’ (37%) about cloud security issues.
When questioned as to the specific threats they are concerned about within cloud environments, 80% of respondents admitted they are ‘very concerned’ or ‘concerned’ about ransomware hijacking corporate data in the cloud. In addition to ransomware, the biggest threats to cloud environments were:
· Unauthorized access (67%)
· Data leakage (65%)
· Denial-of-service attacks (52%)
· Insecure interfaces / APIs (48%)
· Posting confidential data by employees / malicious insiders (33%)
· State-sponsored cyberattacks (32%)
When asked ‘Which of the following security capabilities would most increase your confidence in adopting cloud environments?’ respondents stated:
· Visibility, reporting, auditing & alerting on security events across all platforms (74%)
· Effective mapping of security controls for internally-hosted applications to the cloud infrastructure (51%)
· Consistent security policies and enforcement across cloud platforms (48%)
Check Point asked respondents participants which security controls are the most effective methods to protect data in the cloud. The answers were:
· Data encryption (72%)
· Traffic encryption or VPNs (60%)
· Access control/user authorization (56%)
· Network monitoring, reporting and forensics (53%)
· Intrusion prevention systems (44%)
· Data leakage prevention (41%)
· Firewalls (38%)
Don Meyer, head of cloud and data center product marketing at Check Point said: “Perceived security risk is the biggest factor holding back faster adoption of cloud computing. The overwhelming benefits of cloud computing should drive organizations and security teams to find a way to ‘get cloud done’. This is a prime example of where security can have a profound impact on enabling business transformation, by giving organizations full visibility into all security events, along with consistent security protections across both on-premise and cloud environments.”
