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Cloudstanding: 70 per cent of UK employees use unauthorised cloud services at work
May 2016 by Cloudstanding
A study of over 350 IT professionals reveals that 70 per cent of employees are using cloud technologies that are not managed or supervised by their company.
The media industry, with 83 per cent of employees using unauthorised services, is leading the ranking, compared with manufacturing at the bottom of the list, still with 49 per cent of their workforce using uncontrolled cloud tech.
Commissioned by Cloudstanding.co.uk, a platform which educates and helps businesses adopt cloud technologies, the research was conducted with IT professionals, managers and C-suite executives in the UK, across a variety of sectors, ranging from SMEs to enterprises with 5000+ employees.
Maarten ten Broeke, Cloudstanding co-founder says: “Companies are in the dark when it comes to which cloud services are being used by their employees, how much sensitive corporate data is being uploaded and shared, and whom it is being shared with.
“Cloud services enable productivity and efficiency for employees, but unless it is properly managed and secured by companies, there will always be the risk of data leaks and security threats entering the company from external sources.”
Just over 45 per cent of these IT professionals identified employee mobility, which has experienced significant growth off the back of emerging cloud services, as the biggest business need in the next year, followed by disaster recovery and big data analytics.
Further results from the survey reveal that 40 per cent of respondents were concerned about deployment and 37 per cent, about the complexity involved in the use of cloud technologies.
ten Broeke continues: “Cloud services can be integrated within companies securely and with oversight of the IT department, without forcing employees to resort to using these services in the shadows – the resource and technology exists to make this a reality. Greater, company wide education, from the C-suite to the IT department, on the benefits of integrating these cloud services, would help to minimise the risk of hidden usage.”
Survey methodology
The survey was conducted online from a field of 355 IT professionals and decision makers, between the 18th April to 1st May.
