Survey reveals public cloud use continues to grow, but security remains an issue
While the public cloud has grown in popularity among businesses in recent years, security issues have slowed greater adoption, according to a survey conducted by Barracuda Networks, a company that specializes in security, networking and storage products. The study, conducted in collaboration with research firm Vanson Bourne, surveyed 300 IT decision makers from small, medium and large companies across the U.S., which are currently using cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
Some businesses rely on the cloud to test and develop application code. According to the survey, approximately 44% of respondents said they run their infrastructure in a public cloud, expecting this percentage to rise nearly two-fold in five years. Despite the growing perception of the cloud, approximately 74% of respondents said security issues were preventing them from fully embracing it.
Moreover, the survey found the cloud’s model for shared security responsibility is largely misunderstood by companies. With respect to Amazon Web Services (AWS), for instance, Amazon is responsible for securing the underlying infrastructure, while users are responsible for securing the systems they choose to run on top of it. According to the survey, 77% of respondents said they thought cloud providers were responsible for securing data within the public cloud, and 68% thought cloud providers were responsible for securing customer applications. Consequently, 30% of respondents said they did not add more security layers to their public cloud deployments.
“This survey confirms what we are hearing from customers and partners — security remains a key concern for organizations evaluating public cloud, and there’s confusion over where their part of the shared responsibility model begins and ends,” said Tim Jefferson, vice president, public cloud, Barracuda, in a statement.
“Many organizations realize that cloud deployments can be inherently more secure than on-premises deployments because cloud providers are collectively investing more into security controls than they could on their own. However, the organizations benefiting most…are those that understand that their public cloud provider is not responsible for securing data or applications and are augmenting security with support from third-party vendors,” he added.
Among the most commonly used cloud IaaS in the U.S. was Microsoft Azure at 66%, followed by AWS at 46% and Google Cloud at 36%. In an effort to ease concerns among companies about placing sensitive information in the public cloud, Microsoft unveiled a new set of security services and features this week known as Azure Confidential Computing. Nearly half of the respondents said they thought Microsoft Azure provided the optimal public cloud IaaS security offering.
