Security worries delay migration to the cloud

Nearly a third of enterprises plan to increase their public cloud usage in the next 12 to 18 months, but the majority harbor significant concerns about cyber attacks and breaches in their hybrid environments.

An international survey of 450 senior security and network professionals by security vendor AlgoSec reveals the greatest concerns about applications in the cloud are cyber attacks (cited by 58 percent) and unauthorized access (53 percent), followed by application outages and mis-configured cloud security controls.

The biggest security management challenges in hybrid clouds are lack of visibility (cited by 63 percent of enterprises) and managing security policies consistently (61 percent). Demonstrating compliance and managing a mix of firewalls and cloud security controls are also major issues.

Respondents report a range of problems when migrating applications to public clouds. 44 percent have difficulty managing security policies post migration, 32 percent have problems mapping application traffic flows before starting a migration project, and 30 percent report their applications did not work after the cloud migration.

Automation is used to manage security in their hybrid environments by 26 percent, with 20 percent using manual processes. Enterprises that use automation say the top reasons for doing so are speed and accuracy of security changes, ability to speed up migrations to the cloud, providing audit reports and enforcing compliance, and helping to overcome staffing limitations.

"The survey clearly shows that most enterprises are driving their business transformation strategies by expanding their usage of public cloud infrastructure. But they also have significant security concerns about how they will secure and manage their increasingly hybrid environments," says Joanne Godfrey, director of communications at AlgoSec. "As organizations increase their public cloud deployments and migrate applications, it's essential that they have complete visibility across both their on premise and cloud networks, together with the ability to automatically and holistically manage their security policies. This enables them to better protect the business and fulfill compliance demands, while taking full advantage of the cost savings and agility offered by the hybrid cloud model."

You can find out more in the full report on the AlgoSec website and in the infographic below.

Image Credit: Maksim Kabakou/Shutterstock