A new Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) membership study shows that even though cloud adoption is rapidly growing, security concerns are the top factor limiting the use of it entirely. This is likely due to the lack of proper standardizations. Organizations need to understand the full security measures of their cloud service provider and how they impact their organization.
These worries about security are likely based on recent events, such as data breaches, data loss, account hijacking, unmanaged APIs, shared technologies in one cloud and lack of security processes with the large volumes of data. Overall, 67% of respondents said that security is a limiting factor in their cloud plans, although this is down from 80% in 2012, reflecting a growing trust in the cloud. Worries about reliability are down as well, with only 36% of respondents expressing concern, down 8% from 2012. However, more CIOs are concerned about regulatory issues (56%) and vendor lock-in (46%), both of which are up from 2012.
Is security a major challenge for your organization when using the cloud?