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Majority of firms say they aren’t confident in responding to cloud-based data threats

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If data stored in the cloud is under threat, what would you do: fight the fire or hide under the bed and hope everything goes away? The majority of respondents in a recent survey admitted they would do the latter.

The research, commissioned by Informatica and conducted by the Ponemon Institute, found 60% of global respondents were “not confident” they had the ability to proactively respond to cloud-based data threats. 80% said not knowing if sensitive or confidential information could be exposed represents a significant security risk.

Some of the statistics were particularly eye-opening:

  • 65% of respondents said not knowing the location of sensitive or confidential data “kept them up at night”, and was more of a fear than hackers (25%) and employee mistakes (18%)
  • Only 19% of organisations polled have a common process for implementing new controls and preventative measures in the presence of a new threat
  • Just over one in five (21%) respondents said they would be able to detect a breach all the time

One aspect of the research the majority of respondents agree on is the use of automated solutions for discovering where sensitive data has proliferated – three quarters (73%) believe automated solutions would make their company’s data security activities more effective.

Recent surveys on the state of cloud security are still providing negative, nerve-jangling results. A CipherCloud assessment on cloud data protection found compliance and auditing privacy was the biggest security challenge associated with cloud computing. Compliance (64%) was the primary concern, followed by unprotected data for documents (32%).

Similarly, 90% of users polled in the LinkedIn Information Security group said they were either “very” or “moderately” concerned about public cloud security.

It’s worth noting as well that Informatica isn’t releasing the survey information out of the goodness of their heart either. The company is also launching Informatica Secure@Source, a solution which enables enterprises to take a data-centric approach to information security. You can find out more about that here, and more on the Ponemon Institute report here.