As financial institutions grapple with the trend toward cloud computing—essentially delivery of service over the internet—a recent international survey reveals general concern and confusion

Most enterprises in all industries face apprehension over adopting cloud computing, and with good reason: Nearly half (43%) of enterprise IT decision makers reported a security lapse or issue with their cloud provider within the last 12 months, according to a recent global cloud security survey conducted by cloud security vendor Trend Micro.

The global survey of 1,200 U.S., U.K., German, Indian, Canadian, and Japanese IT managers uncovers the insecurities and concerns surrounding their journey to the cloud. It confirmed that, on the whole, enterprises are moving toward the cloud at a brisk pace and are initiating a giant multiplicative wave of new deployments. Although slightly over 10% of the respondents currently have cloud computing projects in production, close to half are either implementing or piloting new cloud applications.

Despite cloud computing’s growing popularity in most countries, confusion is still at play among enterprises, some of whom don't recognize what cloud computing services are. When presented with a list of cloud computing services, 93% of the respondents said they are currently working with at least one of them. Seven percent of the same respondents said that their company has no plans to deploy any cloud computing service.

“Based on our data, we see about five times more cloud applications coming online in the next few years, yet 43% of existing cloud users had a security incident last year,” said Dave Asprey, vice-president of cloud security, Trend Micro.  “On top of that, some respondents didn’t even know they were using the cloud, much less securing it. Given that many cloud service providers do not adequately add IT resources to security, the reality is that securing your cloud environment is not an option, it’s a necessity.”

While security is still the major hindrance toward cloud adoption, more enterprises are now perceiving performance and availability of cloud services to be of near-equal consideration. According to the survey, the top barriers respondents see in adopting cloud computing services are: Concerns over security of data or cloud infrastructure (50%) and performance and availability of cloud service (48%).

“In the past, security concerns were the primary inhibitors to cloud adoption. Now, performance and availability have equal influence over IT decision makers” said Asprey. “As we witnessed in recent data breach incidents, everything is linked—poor security causes downtime, as well as bad performance.”

When it comes to safeguarding sensitive data stored in the cloud, enterprises turn to encryption. Eighty five percent of respondents said they encrypt data stored in the cloud. And before taking the plunge into cloud adoption, more than half of survey respondents said they would be more likely to consider a cloud provider if encrypted data storage were included in the offering. Nevertheless, most commonly used encryption key management techniques used in the cloud today are vulnerable.

First introduced last year, the Trend Micro SecureCloud security platform applies policy-based key-management technology with industry-standard encryption to give control over data stored in public, private or hybrid clouds back to enterprises. It alleviates data security, privacy and compliance risks associated with deploying information into any cloud-computing environment.

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