Cloud security and the risks associated with cloud adoption continue to be a major concern for IT leaders, according to Versa Networks' 2022 State of Cloud Security survey. The main concern is data security.
More than 85 percent are afraid of imminent data protection violations and thus of the compromise of confidential or sensitive information, which can lead to a loss of trust on the part of customers and damage to reputation. According to more than half of those surveyed, economic fluctuations and a recession in particular could stand in the way of the necessary investments in cloud security in the future and thus further increase the attack surface.
75 percent of workloads take place in the cloud
Cloud usage in companies has risen sharply in recent years, also as a result of the remote work boom caused by the pandemic. However, it has not yet reached its peak. Sixty-four percent of IT and data managers surveyed said at least three-quarters of their workload is now in the cloud, and 64 percent expect that percentage to continue to increase over the next three years. 91 percent mainly rely on a multi-cloud deployment.
Experts assume that companies will continue to rely less on specific cloud-based tools and platforms in the future, and will instead migrate complete company applications to cloud-based solutions. Gartner expects global spending on cloud services to reach more than $482 billion this year alone.
Budgets for cloud security are set to increase
This development also has an impact on the security strategy of companies that want to react to the increased attack surface caused by cloud migration: 85 percent of those surveyed stated that their company had increased their investments in cloud security in the past three years and 93 percent expect corresponding investments to be further increased in the next three years.
Investments were made less in individual solutions than in combined security strategies: when asked what security measures they had taken to protect valuable information stored in the cloud, the majority of IT professionals stated that they opted for a combination of multi-cloud security programs (63,7%), cloud security posture management (56,0%), and out-of-the-box cloud security tools from public cloud providers (49,5%).
However, economic crises could threaten this overspending: 55 percent of IT professionals have already found that economic fluctuations have a strong impact on cloud security budgets and 61 percent are convinced that a recession will reduce investment in cloud management and such would lead to more security threats.
Reputation is often jeopardized
In fact, the topic of cloud security is often neglected: 79 percent of the IT professionals surveyed have the impression that companies are making cutbacks when it comes to protecting sensitive data in the cloud. By doing so, they risk data breaches that can result in loss of customer trust and reputational damage. as a study by Businesswire from 2019 shows: 81 percent of consumers would stop using a company's online services after a data breach.
The background of the study
On behalf of Versa Networks, a total of 2022 IT and data professionals were surveyed in September 600 on the topics of cloud use and deployment, the importance of cloud security in the company and the impact of economic fluctuations on security investments.
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About Versa Networks Versa Networks, the leader in SASE, combines comprehensive security, advanced networking, full-featured SD-WAN, true multi-tenancy, and advanced analytics over the cloud, on-premises, or a combination of both to address SASE needs from small to extreme to meet the requirements of large companies and service providers. Versa SASE is available on-premises, hosted through Versa-operated service providers, in the cloud and through Versa Titan, a simplified cloud service designed for IT Lean.