More than half of the workforce at about half of all companies in business are using cloud applications, like Dropbox or Salesforce. And that uptake is driving adoption for security-as-a-service offerings.
The fresh survey, from Thycotic, also shows that about 32.5%—the largest percentage of respondents—said that 75% or more of their employees have access to an application in the cloud. The top three usage scenarios are email, storage and collaboration/project management—all areas involving rich repositories of company data.
When asked how important it is to protect privileged accounts that have access to company data, the vast majority—85.8%—said that it was “very important.” But only 62% said they feel that these accounts are already very secure and well-guarded. It indicates a gap and potential area of future investment.
Growing businesses require a mature focus on protecting the network and data from crippling threats that take advantage of unmanaged privileged accounts to gain undetected access to the network. Interestingly, the survey found that the embrace of the cloud extends to security solutions, too. The survey found that 60.6% said they would be “very likely” to use a cloud platform to protect passwords on privileged accounts.
“Our assumption was that because organizations often are often worried about security when they implement a SaaS solution, that they would be hesitant to use an SaaS deployment model for protecting their company’s information assets,” said a company spokesperson. “That assumption proved to be wrong.”
The results fit with findings from the 2016 Gartner Market Guide for Privileged Access Management (PAM), which predicts that by 2019, 30% of new PAM purchases will be delivered as a service or run in the cloud (up from less than 5% today). This growth suggests that the need for managed virtual infrastructure and cloud services will become more critical.
Dovetailing with the trend, Thycotic has announced Secret Server Cloud, a cloud-based privileged account management solution engineered to keep organizations’ most valued assets in the cloud by allowing enterprises to discover, manage and protect their privileged accounts.
“The next killer app in the cloud is privileged account management as a service,” said Joseph Carson, Thycotic security specialist. “Many companies are moving away from traditional brick and mortar offices and with this we see many of those companies moving to the cloud to fully run and operate their business. However, as those businesses start to grow quickly and even as traditional companies use more and more cloud services, managing and securing all of those privileged accounts start to become a major challenge.”
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