A survey on cloud application and services adoption and its impact upon data protection, being conducted in partnership with Netskope, has gone live on ITWeb.

With the continual change in where and how people work and new services and applications being introduced regularly, this survey aims to provide visibility into the readiness of organisations to protect their data wherever it may reside. The survey will also allow organisations to benchmark themselves against their peers and make plans to further develop the protection of their critical data.

Rich Davis, chief technology strategist, EMEA for Netskope, says: “The reality is that organisations have rapidly adopted cloud technology, be it Software as a Service applications or public cloud infrastructure, but the security layer to protect people and their data was not designed for this environment, where people and data are everywhere. This leads not only to an increase in risk, but also to higher operational costs and a poor user experience."

The vast majority of cloud applications used by your employees will not be company sanctioned and controlled, he says. "With over half of all business-related web traffic now heading to and from cloud services, it has never been more apparent that organisations need to adopt a single platform to provide access to, and protect, web and cloud traffic, whether company controlled or not."

“Yet the vast majority of organisations rely on legacy VPN connections for access, traditional secure web gateways and network DLP not designed to protect over half the traffic it sees,” says Davis.

This legacy approach leads to gaps in defences and easy routes for data to both unintentionally and maliciously be transferred outside of an organisation's control.

Davis explains, “As an example, an employee working from home needs to access an organisation's application hosted in a public cloud service. Not only are they connecting back into the corporate environment and back out unnecessarily, often having a negative impact on the user experience, but in doing so they are passing through a security layer that is often blind to the underlying communication providing a minimal layer of data protection.”

With this survey we want to understand how ready organisations feel they are to support the growing use of cloud applications and services, when it comes to protecting their data. The survey seeks to understand where organisations feel they are most at risk from data loss or theft and key challenges they believe they will face in the next three years.

"Within organisations, consolidation to drive cost reduction is always top of mind, but many organisations don’t consider the other key benefits technology consolidation can bring, especially within their security stack," says Davis.

“Firstly, using a single platform for both access and security provides end-to-end visibility to streamline troubleshooting and gain deep insight into the user experience. Secondly, consolidation will close data security gaps that are often present without the need to add yet another layer of complexity.”

Have your say, take a quick data protection survey

Please take some time to participate in the survey, and stand a chance to win a lucky draw prize, a Takealot voucher to the value of R5 000.

The detailed results of the survey, which will allow you to benchmark yourself against your peers, and the name of the prize winner will be published on ITWeb.

To play your role in compiling this data protection trends report, click on the link below:

https://www.itweb.co.za/survey/LgGb3BwMWAv2k6Vn

Survey: Is your security ready for cloud technology?