CipherCloud Releases Report on Shadow IT and Cloud Security

Gigaom Research and CipherCloud, the leader in cloud visibility and data protection, have announced the results of their “Shadow IT: data protection and cloud security” study. The research examined the extent of enterprises’ cloud adoption, their challenges and security concerns, and the growing prevalence of shadow IT.

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“Organisations are moving beyond curiosity about the cloud to actual deployment,” said George Crump, Gigaom Research analyst. “SaaS is growing at 199 percent and is the typical home for shadow IT. It is growing because end-users are impatient with IT and looking for alternatives.”

Adoption of the Cloud is Accelerating

The results of the study indicate that cloud market will grow 126.5 percent this year with the majority of the growth in two areas – Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) growing at 199 percent and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) at 126 percent.

Top Risks Identified with Cloud Adoption

Security is the number one cloud adoption concern, with 62 percent selecting is as the top concern. Second at 44 percent was the performance of those applications, and third at 41 percent was the time needed to develop cloud related skills. The study found that IT professional consider encryption as the the key aspect of security. By encryption, it must be end-to-end from the moment that the data leaves the network to the data being stored at rest in the cloud.

Number of Cloud Applications Adopted

Over half of survey respondents reported that they had more than 10 cloud applications in production, with a notable 32 percent indicating significant use of 51 or more cloud applications. This only includes the cloud applications that IT is aware of and controls; it does not include Shadow IT cloud instances.

Growth of Shadow IT

One of the big challenges is having visibility into cloud adoption within their organisation. Among line of business employees, 81 admitted to using unauthorised SaaS applications. 38 percent of employees deliberately went around IT in adopting applications because the IT approval process in their companies is reportedly too slow.

Most Popular Cloud Applications

The study revealed that the most commonly requested cloud applications were those related to communications, file-sync-and-share, and disaster recovery followed by CRM and other sales automation tools.

“The research underscores the rapid adoption of the cloud by businesses both by IT and line of business employees,” said Paige Leidig, Chief Marketing Officer, CipherCloud. “It also reinforces security as a key concern and the importance of encryption to ensure data is fully protected and controlled.”

See below for an infographic of CipherCloud and Gigaom Research’s findings.

To read the full report, please click here.

About CipherCloud

CipherCloud, the leader in cloud information protection, enables organizations to accelerate their adoption of cloud applications while ensuring visibility and control of their data. CipherCloud delivers data privacy, regulatory compliance, and data residency in the Cloud through an open platform that provides comprehensive cloud application and data discovery, protection – search strong encryption, tokenization, data loss prevention, key management, and malware detection – and activity and anomaly monitoring services.

CipherCloud has experienced exceptional growth and success with over 2.6 million business users, across 25 countries, and in more than 11 industries.

The CipherCloud product portfolio protects popular cloud applications out-of-the-box such as salesforce.com, Box, and Microsoft Office 365.

CipherCloud, named as SC Magazine’s 2013 Best Product of the Year, is backed by premier venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and T-Venture, the venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom. For more information, visit www.ciphercloud.com and follow us on Twitter @ciphercloud.