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Enterprises want more public cloud – yet security issues block their path

A new survey released by AlgoSec sets the scene on organisational cloud deployments: almost a third of respondents say they plan to increase their public cloud usage in the next 12 to 18 months, but major security challenges remain across hybrid enterprise networks both during and after migrations.

The study, titled ‘Hybrid Cloud Environments: The State of Security’, polled 450 senior security and network professionals and found a lack of visibility and managing security policies consistently were the biggest security management challenges enterprises face in hybrid environments.

As companies ramp up their public cloud deployments, needing complete visibility across both on-premise and cloud networks is therefore essential. Almost half of respondents say their organisation runs up to 20% of its workloads in the cloud, compared to a quarter (25.7%) who run between 21% and 40% and 11.7% of respondents running between 41% and 60%.

These numbers will almost certainly rise in future reports; yet security continues to be a primary concern. The biggest issue companies say they are facing is cyberattacks, cited by 59% of respondents, while unauthorised access by outsiders (53%), downtime or outages (46%), or misconfiguration of cloud security controls (41%) were also highly cited.

When it comes to specific vendors, Microsoft Azure took the honours, cited by 57.8% of respondents, ahead of Amazon Web Services on 52.4%. A yawning gap followed to Google Cloud Platform (18.8%), Oracle (9%), Rackspace (7.3%) and Alibaba Cloud (1.5%).

“As organisations increase their public cloud deployments and migrate applications, it’s essential that they have complete visibility across both their on-premise and cloud networks, together with the ability to automatically and holistically manage their security policies,” said Joanne Godfrey, director of communications at AlgoSec.

“This enables them to better protect the business and fulfil compliance demands, while taking full advantage of the cost savings and agility offered by the hybrid cloud model.”

You can find out more about the report here.