77% of Businesses Saw Rogue Cloud Deployments in 2012
40% of them suffered exposure of confidential -
Symantec survey
key survey findings showed enterprises and SMBs are
experiencing escalating costs tied to rogue cloud use, complex backup and
recovery, and inefficient cloud storage. Rogue clouds are defined as business
groups implementing public cloud applications that are not managed by or
integrated into the company's IT infrastructure.
Industry experts predict several key issues will arise
in 2013 focused on the financial pressures and security challenges of cloud
computing. BC is seen as an important issue with the increase in cloud outages
posing greater risks than security breaches. Over the holidays, a leading cloud
service provider experienced an outage, which they quickly remediated. This
outage impacted businesses and posed important concerns around data loss
prevention, backup, time spent on data recovery and the associated costs.
However, with advance preparation, organizations can build safe, agile and
efficient clouds that will enable them to meet their business goals.
Rogue Cloud Implementations
According to the survey, rogue cloud deployments are one of
the cost pitfalls. It is a surprisingly common problem, found in more than three
quarters (77%) of businesses within the last year. It also seems to be an issue
experienced more by enterprises (83%), due to their larger company size, than
SMBs (70%).
Among organizations who reported rogue cloud issues, 40% experienced the
exposure of confidential information, and more than a quarter faced account
takeover issues, defacement of Web properties, or stolen goods or services. The
most commonly cited reasons for undertaking rogue cloud projects were to save
time and money.
Cloud Backup and Recovery Issues
Cloud is complicating backup and
recovery. First, most organizations use three or more solutions to backup their
physical, virtual and cloud data-leading to increased IT inefficiencies, risk
and training costs. Furthermore, 43% of
organizations have lost cloud data (47% of enterprises and 36% of SMBs), and
most (68%) have experienced recovery failures.
Finally, most see cloud recovery as a slow, tedious process.
Only 32% rate this is as fast and 22% estimate it would take three or more days
to recover from a catastrophic loss of data in the cloud
Inefficient Cloud Storage
One of the key advantages to cloud
storage is how simple it is to provision. Sometimes this simplicity leads to
inefficient cloud storage. Generally, organizations strive to maintain a storage
utilization rate above 50%. According to the survey,
cloud storage utilization is surprisingly low at 17%.
There is a tremendous difference in this area between enterprises (which are
utilizing 26% of their storage) and SMBs (which is a shockingly low seven%).
Furthermore, roughly half admit very little, if any, of their cloud data is
de-duplicated, further compounding the problem.
Compliance and eDiscovery Concerns
According to the survey, 49% of organizations are concerned
about meeting compliance requirements in the cloud, and a slightly larger number
(53%) are concerned about being able to prove they have met cloud compliance
requirements. This concern about information in the cloud is well founded, as
23% of organizations have been fined for cloud privacy violations.
eDiscovery is creating additional
pressure on businesses to quickly find the right information. One-third of
businesses reported receiving eDiscovery requests for cloud data. Of those,
two-thirds have missed their cloud discovery deadlines, leading to fines and
legal risks.
Data in Transit Issues
Organizations have all sorts of assets
in the cloud - such as web properties, online businesses or web applications -
that require SSL certificates to protect the data in transit whether it is
personal or financial information, business transactions and other online
interactions. The survey showed companies found managing many SSL certificates
to be highly complex: Just 27% rate cloud
SSL certificate management as easy and only 40% are certain their
cloud-partner's certificates are in compliance with corporate standards.