ITWeb, in partnership with Veritas, conducted an online survey on securing the enterprise in a multi cloud environment.
The survey sought to explore the cyber security gaps in standard backup and disaster recovery offerings that cloud service providers (CSPs) offer.
A total of 127 valid responses were captured, with 56% of respondents being at management level, and working in a range of major industry sectors. Some 37% of respondents came from the IT sector and the rest were spread across other sectors, with the financial services and government sectors well represented.
Here are some of the key findings:
- Thirty percent of the survey respondents said that their organisation currently used one certified public cloud service provider – excluding SaaS, while 27% said they used two providers and 19% used three providers.
- Almost half (45%) of the survey respondents say their organisation has complete visibility to monitor, access and analyse data stored within cloud environments. 27% say they have some visibility and 20% say they have limited or very limited visibility.
- The top three benefits that respondent organisations experience when using a public cloud service provider are: data security (69%); scalability (59%); and flexibility (58%).
- 39% of respondent organisations say that they use native cloud security tools when accessing/storing data in cloud environments all the time. 27% say they use these tools most of the time and 23% say they use them some of the time.
- More than half of respondent organisations (59%) agree that relying solely on native cloud security tools puts their organisation at risk. 38% don’t believe this to be the case.
- Most respondents (70%) believe there are gaps in cybersecurity when using a native cloud security tool. A quarter (25%) of respondents disagree.
- Just over half (56%) of survey respondents use the default configuration when using native cloud security tools. 37% say they don’t use the default configuration.
- 71% of respondents agree that the complexity of data protection and recovery is made more complex because native cloud security tools differ between providers.
- 64% of respondents say that they haven’t experienced data loss as a result of relying on cloud native backup, while 20% say they have lost data.
- Just over half (55%) of respondents don’t believe that their organisation is at greater risk of being the victim of ransomware as a result of relying on cloud native security backup. 37% believe they are at risk.
- Asked why their organisation uses native cloud security tools when accessing/storing data in cloud environments, respondents cited ease of use (59%), cost effectiveness (56%) and low levels of maintenance (46%) as their top three reasons.
- The impact – if any - that respondent organisations experienced because of a ransomware attack on the data they hold within cloud environments was listed as:
- My organisation has not experienced a ransomware attack (42%)
- My organisation has not experienced any impacts from a ransomware attack (23%)
- Organisational downtime (23%)
- Financial loss – data recovery (19%)
- Exposure of sensitive data / information (16%)
- Damage to reputation (16%)
- Permanent / temporary loss of data (16%)
- Financial loss – ransom payments (13%)
- Over the past two years, the top three reasons that caused respondent organisations to experience downtime were: hardware / software outage (48%), human error (36%) and application failure (35%).
- Strategies that organisations have in place to protect their data within cloud environments include: multi factor authentication (75%); malware detection (51%); differing admin credentials (45%) and limited trusted devices (45%)