Cloud Security and Performance Monitoring Still Needs Improvement

How’s the security for your cloud? Is it performing properly? According to a survey from AccelOps, Inc., there’s still a need for better security and performance monitoring for cloud-based data centers, as a majority of companies are lacking in effective security and believe their current monitoring tools are not good enough.

According to the survey, currently 65 percent of organizations use cloud services, but only 46 percent of them are using it for mission-critical applications and data. This, of course, is due to security concerns, as many do not believe that the cloud is secure enough to store sensitive data, should it be lost or stolen.

When it comes to regulatory compliance, confidences aren’t that high either. 39 percent of the respondents do not feel that their current SIEM and infrastructure monitoring tools are good enough for supporting regulatory compliance requirements, much less cloud security. However, most tend to feel that IT staff should be responsible for cloud security, rather than the MSPs.

Only slightly over half of the survey respondents expressed satisfaction with the Service-Level Agreements offered for security and access control. The rest, surprisingly, were completely neutral.

At the same time, BYOD continues to grow in popularity and demand. This has made cloud security an important issue, since the company cloud can and will be used by mobile employees on whichever devices they so choose. It’s important that a company can allow its employees devices in, while still blocking outside threats and invaders, so the need for a platform that can identify threats and monitor IT operations across all infrastructures has never been greater.

As such, we can clearly see that organizations need to own and be responsible for their data. Of course, cloud service providers and customers also need more insight into the cloud resources, as well as service performance and availability against SLAs, which will keep the customers more confident and satisfied.

The cloud has become a nearly essential part of today’s work environment, but that does not mean it is without its flaws. Security and monitoring are still important issues that are not addressed as much as they should be, so companies need to take better steps to create, find, or provide solutions that can keep their data in private or hybrid clouds safe from those who would seek it.