Check Point has released the findings of a survey showing that security concerns are the biggest barrier to businesses migrating to cloud environments.
Security risks were found to be the biggest factor holding back faster adoption of cloud computing. 93 percent of respondents said they were ‘very concerned’ (56 percent) or ‘concerned’ (37 percent) about cloud security issues.
When questioned as to the specific threats they are concerned about within cloud environments, 80 percent of respondents admitted they are ‘very concerned’ or ‘concerned’ about ransomware hijacking corporate data in the cloud. In addition to ransomware, the biggest threats to cloud environments were:
- Unauthorized access (67 percent)
- Data leakage (65 percent)
- Denial-of-service attacks (52 percent)
- Insecure interfaces / APIs (48 percent)
- Posting confidential data by employees / malicious insiders (33 percent)
- State-sponsored cyberattacks (32 percent).
When asked ‘Which of the following security capabilities would most increase your confidence in adopting cloud environments?’ respondents stated:
- Visibility, reporting, auditing & alerting on security events across all platforms (74 percent);
- Effective mapping of security controls for internally-hosted applications to the cloud infrastructure (51 percent);
- Consistent security policies and enforcement across cloud platforms (48 percent).
Check Point asked respondents participants which security controls are the most effective methods to protect data in the cloud. The answers were:
- Data encryption (72 percent)
- Traffic encryption or VPNs (60 percent)
- Access control/user authorization (56 percent)
- Network monitoring, reporting and forensics (53 percent)
- Intrusion prevention systems (44 percent)
- Data leakage prevention (41 percent)
- Firewalls (38 percent).
The Check Point survey was conducted by Crowd Research, and gauged the opinions of over 200 cybersecurity and IT professionals in public and private sector companies globally.
