INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
As organizations increasingly turn to the cloud to store data, a new global study from Thales, with research from the Ponemon Institute, has
revealed that only a third (32%) of organizations employ a security-first approach to data storage in the cloud.To compile its 2019 Thales
Global Cloud Security Study, the firm surveyed more than 3,000 IT and IT security practitioners from Australia, Brazil, France, Germany,
India, Japan, the UK and the US
Of those surveyed, only one in three (31%) organizations believe that protecting data in the cloud is their own responsibility.Thales' study
found that nearly half (48%) of organizations have a multi-cloud strategy with AWS, Microsoft Azure and IBM being the top three cloud
On average, organizations use three different cloud computing service providers and 28 percent are using four or more.Despite storing
sensitive data in the cloud, almost half (46%) of respondents revealed that storing consumer data in the cloud makes them more of a security
risk with 56 percent noting that it poses a compliance risk as well
Additionally, organizations believe that cloud service providers bear the most responsibility for sensitive data in the cloud (35%), ahead
cloud providers, only 23 percent of respondents said security is a factor when choosing a cloud service.Thales discovered that a little over
half (51%) of businesses and other organizations still do not use encryption to protect sensitive data in the cloud
However, the study uncovered regional disparities in terms of data security with German organizations being the most advanced in their use
of encryption at 66 percent.The study also revealed that organizations have begun to hand over the keys to their encrypted data to cloud
Nearly half of cloud companies (44%) provide encryption keys when data is stored in the cloud, ahead of in-house teams (36%) and third
Additionally, 53 percent of cloud providers are controlling these encryption keys themselves despite the fact that 78 percent of respondents
say it is important that their organization retains control of the keys.Of those surveyed, 54 percent think cloud storage makes it more
Having pushed the responsibility towards cloud providers, it is surprising to see that security is not a primary factor during the selection
