Enterprises struggle to discover cloud access policies

Cloud use is commonplace among large enterprises, with 82 percent of organizations with $1B or more in revenue using three or more clouds, up from 66 percent last year.

However, with the majority of companies (70 percent) using two or more identity systems, 75 percent of respondents say they lack the ability to easily discover all existing access policies, according to a new study conducted by Osterman Research for Strata Identity.

"Distributed identities across scattered identity silos result in inconsistent policies when people are accessing apps, posing significant security and data privacy risks," says Michael Sampson, senior analyst for Osterman Research. "Poor visibility of existing access policies means enterprises are flying blind -- they do not know where apps are hosted, nor who has access to their data. In our opinion, the rapid adoption of multi-cloud is elevating this problem to critical status."

Among smaller enterprises, 49 percent currently use three or more clouds. In 12 months, three or more clouds are expected to be in use by 95 percent of large enterprises and 58 percent of smaller ones.

Data privacy (77 percent) and managing identities across multiple clouds (66 percent) are the two top-ranked barriers preventing organizations from achieving their desired perfect target state of apps deployed in the cloud.

"Multi-cloud is forcing organizations to rely on manual identity management integration efforts, which only provide limited visibility and weak controls," says Eric Olden, CEO of Strata Identity. "Identity Orchestration software offers the missing link to future-proofing identity architectures, removing dependencies between apps and specific identity providers and enforcing consistent runtime access policies for apps across multiple clouds."

The full report is available from the Strata site.

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