Concern for security of data in the cloud worries IT execs

Even as healthcare organizations contemplate moving more computing functions to the cloud, IT execs question the security of their data.

A survey from the Cloud Security Alliance, which works to ensure a secure cloud computing environment, found 69 percent of respondent organizations are migrating data for enterprise resource planning applications to the cloud, with nearly 90 percent using a cloud platform to support and protect business critical operations.

However, more than half of respondents say they expect security incidents in their clouds to increase this year.

Who is accountable for security is unclear. While 60 percent say the cloud service vendor is responsible for a breach, 77 percent of respondents also acknowledge that they themselves should be responsible for securing their cloud applications.

Third parties are least accountable and responsible, survey results show. “This perception gap shows that organizations need to take more ownership of their business-critical applications while migrating them to the cloud,” according to the Cloud Security Alliance.

Also See: Moving to cloud without security strategy increases risk

With the shift to the cloud, organizations are exploring whether a cloud environment might alleviate common challenges that business-clinical operations face, says John Yeoh, a director of research in the Alliance. “As moving to the cloud raises its own security and privacy challenges, we wanted to provide some benchmarks regarding issues surrounding cloud migration and security.”



The survey, sponsored by Onapsis, a vendor of business-critical security, surveyed nearly 200 managers, C-level executives and staff from various organizations. Findings include:

73 percent of users in the Americas were more likely to migrate business-critical applications than users in Europe.

Companies are adding measures to protect enterprise resource planning applications in the cloud, which includes identity and access controls (68 percent of respondents), firewalls (63 percent) and vulnerability assessment (62 percent).

Benefits of moving to the cloud include scalability, lower cost of ownership, and security patching and updating by the vendor.

Respondents said that barriers to moving computing to the cloud include moving of sensitive data (mentioned by 65 percent of respondents), security (59 percent) and compliance challenges (54 percent).