Cloud adoption moving businesses forward faster – McAfee

Cybersecurity company McAfee has released a special edition of its Cloud and Risk Adoption Report, focused on the business impact of cloud services and how organisations around the world are addressing security gaps to accelerate their businesses with the cloud.

Cloud services are the most significant advance in IT since the introduction of the internet itself, and most organisations today benefit from the collaboration, scalability and cost-effectiveness enabled by the use of cloud services.

With an increasing amount of sensitive data stored in the cloud, organisations are also finding challenges in managing their risk, which holds back many organisations from realising their full potential.

McAfee surveyed 1,000 enterprise organisations worldwide and combined results with insights from billions of anonymised cloud events seen every month by McAfee's CASB, MVISION Cloud.

The results demonstrate that a wide range of organisations accelerate their business from the use of cloud services.

However, there is a divide between organisations who have addressed their shared responsibility for protecting data in the cloud, and those who have not – organisations were over 35% more likely to launch new products, speed time to market, and expand to new markets with the cloud when proactively addressing security of their data in the cloud through the use of a CASB.

This edition of the McAfee Cloud Adoption and Risk Report also found:

• Most sensitive data is under the IT team's control: Results showed that 65% of enterprise data lives in collaboration and business software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, 25% in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and only 10% in "Shadow IT" unknown to the IT department.  IT teams are subscribing to these cloud applications themselves, effectively fulfilling many employee needs that were previously unmet or were met through the use of "Shadow IT".
   
• Gap between secure enablement and cloud adoption: Only 36% of organisations said they could enforce data loss prevention in the cloud, and only 33% could control the collaboration settings that determine how their data is shared. In the case of IaaS, only 26% said they could audit configuration settings, widening the gap between risky and secure cloud adoption.
   
• A minority of organisations experiencing the full potential of business acceleration: Although the likelihood of launching new products, speeding time to market and expanding to new markets is higher when a CASB is part of their cloud security strategy, only one in three companies surveyed are currently using one.

"This research shines a light on organisations who are leading the charge in cloud adoption, prioritising the security of their data as they roll out new cloud services and winning in the market because of the actions they are taking," says McAfee Cloud Security senior vice president Rajiv Gupta.

"Organisations 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."