As Cloud Adoption Grows, Canadian Businesses Struggle with Security: Report

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More than three-quarters of Canadian organizations feel they are not adequately addressing cloud security, according to research released Thursday by IT consultancy Scalar Decisions.

The report, Moving up the Value Chain: What We Can Learn from Experienced Cloud Users, shows that security remains the top concern for organizations of all experience levels after adopting cloud.

IDC surveyed 355 Canadian IT decision-makers in August and September for the study, including two-fifths from on-premise only organizations. Responses showed that a majority or near-majority of Canadian organizations have not adopted data classification and accountability (54 percent), client and end-point protection (57 percent), identity and access management (48 percent), and application-level controls (59 percent).

The findings suggest that security is a major concern, but not a barrier to cloud adoption, as respondents’ cloud-based workloads are expected to increase from 31 to 35 percent over the next year, and to 41 percent in three years time, with roughly corresponding budget increases. Neil Bunn, Chief Technology Officer at Scalar Decisions sees a disconnect between the cloud security worries organizations have, and the actions they are taking to deal with them.

“Cloud benefits and business value become progressively more sophisticated as organizations’ experience with the cloud increases,” said Bunn. “Viewing cloud security and cloud adoption as non-severable concepts, coupled with investing in a continuous optimization approach in line with the Cloud Experience Model are key factors to achieve success in a rapidly changing marketplace of cloud based services and capabilities.”

A survey by Trustwave early this year that included respondents from Canada, the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Singapore showed that over three-quarters of IT security professionals feel pressured to unveil projects before they are fully secured. In September, a report by Kaspersky showed that 77 percent of U.S. businesses, and slightly more international companies, have experienced security incidents in the past year.