Organizations Overcoming Fear of Cloud Storage

The COVID-19 pandemic forced a majority of companies to make the switch to the cloud as their employees moved to full-time remote work. With a concern about security, giving up sensitive data to a cloud service provider likely felt foreign to those businesses who haven’t previously switch to a cloud-based model.

Today, more companies are overcoming that fear and are storing more sensitive data in the cloud. The Cloud Security Alliance’s Sensitive Data in the Cloud survey found that around two-thirds of organizations host sensitive data or workloads in the public cloud.

Cloud storage can provide maximum data security. The files are encrypted and continuously monitored to stay protected against threats. The survey showed 89% of respondents found that CSP security controls are effective. Over a fourth of organizations surveyed are already using confidential computing to protect workloads, and 55% have plans to implement confidential computing within the next two years.

“Increasingly, organizations are overcoming their initial apprehension around the cloud and its perceived security insufficiencies and are storing their sensitive data in public cloud environments with a growing use of confidential computing to protect workloads and ensure trust,” said Hillary Baron, senior technical director for research, Cloud Security Alliance, and a lead author of the report.

However, some are still apprehensive.  Just under a third of organizations were not confident or only slightly confident about their ability to protect sensitive data in a cloud environment and another 44% reported they were only moderately confident.

“In general, organizations have reservations about their own ability to protect their sensitive data in the cloud. By shedding light on these issues, we can find ways to address and eventually close the gap between the perceived effectiveness of cloud service providers’ security controls and organizations' lacking confidence in their abilities to protect sensitive data in the cloud,” said Baron.