A new research report from Symantec has warned against the use of ‘rogue’ clouds for best practice.

The survey, entitled ‘Avoiding the Hidden Costs of Cloud’, spoke to IT execs at 3,236 organisations across nearly 30 countries worldwide and found that there was a link between using rogue clouds and losing confidential information, resulting in hidden costs.

A rogue cloud is one which is unauthorised, or as Symantec put it, “business groups implementing public cloud applications that are not managed by or integrated into the company’s IT infrastructure.”

In a related blog post, Symantec came up with four tips to ensure avoiding these cost traps:

• Focus cloud policies on information and people rather than technologies and platforms
• Educate, monitor and enforce policies
• Embrace platform-agnostic tools
• Remove all duplicate data in the cloud

The results of the survey showed that rogue clouds were an issue in three quarters of …