Authors:
Ramnath Sai Sagar
With over 3,000 IT professionals surveyed, the recent Ponemon study sponsored by Gemalto addressed issues concerning the “Global State of Cloud Data Security.” The webcast can be viewed here and the report can be downloaded here. The participants represented a good cross section of company scale and geographic location around the world. Over 70% of those surveyed believe that the “management of privacy and data protection regulations” are more complex in the cloud, due in part to the fact that a similar number believe that it is “more difficult to protect confidential or sensitive information in the cloud” (see graphic).
Whereas enterprises look to save money, improve scalability and simplify their IT infrastructure through cloud services, they believe that security, privacy and compliance are much harder to achieve. Perhaps it is no surprise then that only about a third of those surveyed use encryption to secure their cloud data; however, it is encouraging to note that half of those using cryptographic tools make data unreadable before sending it to the cloud provider, implying that they manage their own keys. Responses are trending in the right direction but we still need to do more work to educate IT pros on how to exceed privacy and regulatory requirements through proper end-to-end encryption.