More than half of CIOs favor cloud-first strategies
Business information leaders are keen to adopt the benefits of the cloud according to a new study by data protection company Bitglass.
The company surveyed nearly 100 CIOs and IT leaders attending the Gartner Symposium IT Expo in Orlando, to better understand their top challenges for 2016 and how they plan to address them.
Among the key findings are that 55 percent of CIOs stated that their organizations will adopt a 'cloud-first' strategy, and nearly 90 percent plan on increasing spending on security for their organization in 2016.
"Progressive CIOs understand the powerful advantages that a cloud-first, security-now strategy can bring to their business," says Nat Kausik, CEO of Bitglass. "As we get ready to turn the page on a year plagued by epic data breaches and other nefarious activity, the increased focus on cloud and on security by IT leaders is encouraging for 2016 and beyond".
Other highlights are that 34 percent of respondents expect to increase spending on cloud security by more than 20 percent in 2016 and, 87 percent will increase their security spend overall. 50 percent of survey respondents reported cost savings in 2015 as a result of their SaaS applications, and Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) adoption is rising fast, with 55 percent of CIOs planning to deploy a CASB in the future.
Controlling downloads to external devices was named as the largest cloud security challenge heading into 2016 by 36 percent of executives, followed by evaluating security of cloud app vendors (24 percent) and external sharing (21 percent). Shadow IT, a major concern from previous years is now a top concern for only 13 percent of CIOs.
The full report is available to download from the Bitglass website.
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