McAfee has released a special edition of its Cloud and Risk Adoption Report revealing that 87 percent of companies experience business acceleration from the use of cloud services.
The cybersecurity firm surveyed 1,000 enterprise organizations worldwide to compile the report and the company combined these results with insights from billions of anonymized cloud events observed every month by its cloud access security broker (CASB), MVISION Cloud.
The results of McAfee's report demonstrate that a wide range of organizations have accelerated their business from the use of cloud services. However, a striking divide exists between organizations who have addressed their shared responsibility for protecting data in the cloud and those who have not.
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The report found that organizations that proactively addressed the security of their data in the cloud through the use of a CSAB were over 35 percent more likely to launch new products, speed time to market and expand into new markets.
Benefits of cloud adoption
McAfee's Cloud and Adoption risk report also revealed that 65 percent of enterprise data lives in collaboration and business software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, 25 percent lives in infrastructure-as-a-service and only 10 percent resides in Shadow IT which is unknown to the IT department. IT teams are subscribing to these cloud applications themselves, thus eliminating employee needs that were previously unmet or were met through the use of Shadow IT.
Of those surveyed, only 36 percent of organizations said they could enforce data loss prevention in the cloud and only 33 percent said they control the collaboration settings that determine how data is shared. When it came to IaaS, only 26 percent said they could audit configuration settings which widens the gap between risky and secure cloud adoption.
Despite benefits such as the likelihood of launching new products, spending time to market and expanding in to new markets, only one in three companies are currently using a CASB.
Senior vice president of cloud security at McAfee, Rajiv Gupta provided further insight on the report's findings, saying:
“This research shines a light on organizations who are leading the charge in cloud adoption, prioritizing the security of their data as they roll out new cloud services and winning in the market because of the actions they are taking. Organizations often tell us how much faster their business moves when security is addressed in the cloud and it is exciting for us now to quantify this experience and share our data and recommendations with the rest of the market.”
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