Public Cloud Forecast: Torrential Rains for IT Security?

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Doug Bonderud.

Partly cloudy: That’s the "sweet spot" for many midsize companies. Mixing local and off-site services produces a sunny kind of optimism, and why not? Providers have been singing the praises of agility and flexibility for the last five years, and many have delivered on their promises. According to a recent Ponemon Institute study, however, the public cloud forecast looks grim — are torrential rains coming for IT security?

Triple Threat

A June 5 Top Tech News article takes a look at the recent Ponemon report, "Data Breach: The Cloud Multiplier Effect." The title itself is ominous enough, and the results aren’t much more encouraging. The research firm asked 613 IT and security professionals to estimate the chances of a breach targeting 100,000 or more consumer records. Not only did respondents feel that cloud services were less secure, but they also put a number to that feeling: They believed that adding one percent more cloud services meant a three percent higher breach chance; in other words, using the cloud could triple a midsize company’s risk to lose millions of dollars…

Not exactly beach weather, then, but what is important here is not the numbers. Instead, it is worth taking a look at the research itself: Ponemon asked experts to estimate the chances of a breach; data from the survey said that respondents "believed" that their data was less secure in the cloud. This is hardly surprising; cloud worry has been a common theme for IT professionals since public deployments started gaining ground several years ago. Ultimately, this means the survey speaks to what might happen if IT fears come true, not what will happen when data moves to the cloud. So what’s the real story?…

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