[February 13, 2017] |
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New Skyhigh, Cloud Security Alliance Report Reveals Growing Security, Compliance Challenges in Face of Increasing Cloud Services Adoption
At the 8th Annual Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Summit at RSA (News - Alert)
in San Francisco today, Skyhigh
Networks, the world's leading Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB),
unveiled a new survey, "Custom
Applications and IaaS Report 2017." Conducted in partnership with
the CSA, the report provides striking details around widespread
migration of custom or internally developed applications from corporate
datacenters to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platforms such as the
Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS) Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud
Platform.
The exhaustive report is based on a broad survey of software
development, IT administration, IT security, operations and devops
professionals across the Americas, EMEA and Asia Pacific, involved in
developing, deploying and securing custom applications. While
respondents forecast rapid IaaS adoption, they at the same time
expressed numerous unresolved concerns about the security and compliance
of their custom applications in IaaS platforms.
"Custom applications are a core part of how our business operates, and
moving these to the cloud provide IT an opportunity to 'start fresh'
with the right visibility, controls and overall security, without
getting in the way of business operations," said Stephen Ward, CISO,
TIAA. "Meeting our security requirements for our applications, as well
as our IaaS environment, is absolutely critical to accomplishing our
business goals for cloud and overall software programs."
Some of the key findings from the survey include:
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Every Company Is a Software Company. Every company has
developers writing custom code to improve engagement with employees,
partners and customers. The average enterprise runs 464 custom
applications and expects the number to grow 20.5 percent in the next
12 months. Yet IT security is aware of only 38.4 percent - a new and
rapidly growing area of shadow computing. The stakes are high for
preventing security compromises: 72.7 percent of companies have a
custom application that, if it were to experience downtime, would
significantly impact the organization's ability to operate.
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At the Brink of the Cloud Tipping Point. Cloud adoption is
accelerating with the growth of software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)) running
at 10x the growth rate of IT in general and the growth rate of IaaS at
20x that of IT in general. In 2017, IaaS adoption will reach a tipping
point because for the first time more custom applications will reside
in public IaaS platforms than in corporate datacenters. Slightly more
than half - 60.9 percent - of custom applications remain in corporate
datacenters today, and this number is expected to decline to 46.2
percent in the next 12 months as enterprises continue to migrate
applications to public IaaS platforms. The two top reasons for moving
to the cloud are scale and cost, and a majority (62.9 percent) of
respondents believe public IaaS platfrms are just as or more secure
than their own datacenters.
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Apps Vulnerable in the IaaS Wilderness. Despite growing
acceptance of public IaaS platforms, IT security departments face a
host of new threats and challenges in the move to the cloud. Under
cloud's shared responsibility model, IaaS platforms secure the
infrastructure but the enterprise is accountable for securing the
corporate data, which includes protecting against compromised login
credentials, rogue administrators and regulatory violations. These
challenges are made more urgent by the fact that 46 percent of
business-critical custom applications are already in the public or
hybrid cloud today and by the rapidly approaching deadline for
complying with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
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C-Suite Jobs on the Line. Companies currently lack the
expertise and tools to effectively deploy security for custom
applications; 64.0 percent of respondents are moderately or very
concerned about the security of custom applications deployed on a
public IaaS platform. Recent high-profile cyber attacks have
illustrated that corporate boards ultimately hold c-level executives
responsible, and 29.1 percent of respondents believe the CIO and the
CISO would lose their jobs in a catastrophic attack on a custom
application. Over half, 50.3 percent, believe the IT security manager
responsible for the application would be fired. Application developers
are considered the least likely to face termination and only 23.3 are
concerned about application security, signaling that IT security must
take the initiative for custom application and IaaS security.
"The results of this survey provide an unfiltered view into the
challenges companies and their IT security leadership are facing because
of the exponential growth in cloud usage," said Jim Reavis, CEO, CSA.
"From custom applications to the infrastructure to the teams tasked with
managing it all, we're seeing a major evolution in how security needs to
be more a focal point when it comes to planning for the increasingly
complex needs of business."
"Data center consolidation is one of the fastest growing trends in IT
today as enterprises move their custom application workloads to public
cloud providers," said Rajiv Gupta, CEO, Skyhigh Networks. "As they do
so, they will have to overcome the security, compliance and governance
challenges unique to cloud. Skyhigh is leading the way for IT security
to empower the business to fully leverage public IaaS platforms by
extending its CASB security controls beyond SaaS to custom applications
and to the IaaS platforms themselves."
Additional Resources
For more stories and to join the cloud security conversation, follow
Skyhigh on The
Cloud Security Blog, Facebook,
LinkedIn
and Twitter.
About Skyhigh Networks
Skyhigh Networks, the world's leading Cloud Access Security Broker
(CASB), enables enterprises to safely adopt SaaS, PaaS and IaaS cloud
services, while meeting their security, compliance and governance
requirements. With more than 600 enterprise customers globally, Skyhigh
provides organizations the visibility and management for all their cloud
services, including enforcement of data loss prevention policies;
detecting and preventing internal and external threats; encrypting data
with customer-controlled keys; and implementing access-control policies.
Headquartered in Campbell, Calif., Skyhigh Networks is backed by
Gridlock Partners, Sequoia Capital (News - Alert), Thomvest Ventures, Tenaya Capital
and other strategic investors. For more information, visit http://www.skyhighnetworks.com.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170213005403/en/
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