Security Concerns Holding Back Cloud Adoption: Check Point Survey
December 2016 by Check Point
Check Point is releasing the findings of a survey of 200
cybersecurity and IT professionals, showing that security concerns are the biggest
barrier to businesses taking up the scalability, flexibility and cost-efficiency
benefits of migrations to cloud environments.
Security risks were found to be the biggest factor holding back faster adoption of
cloud computing. 93% of respondents said they were ’very concerned’ (56%) or
’concerned’ (37%) about cloud security issues.
When questioned as to the specific threats they are concerned about within cloud
environments, 80% 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%)
* Data leakage (65%)
* Denial-of-service attacks (52%)
* Insecure interfaces / APIs (48%)
* Posting confidential data by employees / malicious insiders (33%)
* State-sponsored cyberattacks (32%)
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%)
* Effective mapping of security controls for internally-hosted applications
to the cloud infrastructure (51%)
* Consistent security policies and enforcement across cloud platforms (48%)
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%)
* Traffic encryption or VPNs (60%)
* Access control/user authorization (56%)
* Network monitoring, reporting and forensics (53%)
* Intrusion prevention systems (44%)
* Data leakage prevention (41%)
* Firewalls (38%)
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.