Enterprises are adopting the cloud much faster than their security teams can keep up – and misunderstanding about cloud environments is pervasive.
The 2018 Enterprise Cloud Trends Report from iboss surveyed IT decision makers and office workers in US enterprises and found that 64% of IT decision makers believe the pace of software as a service (SaaS) application adoption is outpacing their cybersecurity capabilities. Combined with growing pressures from shadow IT and mobile employees, 91% of IT decision makers agree they need to update security policies to protect their cloud-first environment.
However, there are also misconceptions when it comes to how much of a threat these challenges are. On average, IT decision makers believe 36% of remote workers bypass security policies; in reality, 48% of office worker respondents admit to bypassing remote work policies and 82% of office workers admit to going around their VPN when working remotely. About 62% of office workers have bypassed the IT department to access a new application, and nearly 80% of IT decision makers believe this type of shadow IT is a major security concern.
The results of the survey also show that approximately half of IT decision makers hesitate to move to cloud-based cybersecurity solutions. The primary concerns they had when evaluating the migration to cloud security were data privacy, cost of maintenance, cost of migration, concerns around legacy infrastructure integration and compliance and data protection regulations.
“This survey clearly shows that large organizations are facing many challenges that can be solved with cloud-based cybersecurity solutions, but they are holding back because of avoidable concerns,” said Paul Martini, CEO and co-founder, iboss. “Office workers are clearly demanding access to SaaS applications and remote work capabilities; the challenge now is to secure them effectively. iboss offers a cloud-based cybersecurity solution that eliminates the need to expose your data to a shared-cloud security service.”