Survey Spotlights IT Need to Address Cloud Security

Yesterday data security company Sophos released the results of a survey it conducted on enterprise use of popular cloud-storage services such as Dropbox, Box, Google Drive and OneDrive.

Sophos collected responses from more than 725 members of online IT forum Spiceworks.com between April 29 and May 16, 2014. The company found that even though only 38 percent of respondents “feel secure sharing or collaborating on corporate content between the cloud and mobile devices,” 84 percent still “allow some level of access from company-issued devices to cloud share services,” and 65 percent “do not encrypt data between the cloud and mobile devices.”

Encryption isn’t the only way to protect corporate data from cloud risks. Some enterprises choose to block or limit cloud access. For example, 38 percent of Sophos’s respondents said they block some cloud services, and 13 percent block access to all cloud services.

Sophos’s survey wasn’t exactly “scientific” — anyone can join Spiceworks. Also, “IT pro” is a broad term and could include anyone from the CIO down to the guy manning a tech support desk, who may not be familiar with his company’s cloud policies.

CIOs and IT managers are, however, increasingly being forced to consider cloud security. The growing popularity of cloud-storage services, and the average user’s likelihood to use them without reading terms of service or understanding how they could put data, or data compliance, at risk is a real issue.

Sophos sells security products, including one that it announced along with the survey results, which aims to address the potential issue of corporate data security in the cloud. Click the image above for a look at a related survey infographic. And for details on the new Sophos product, Sophos Mobile Control 4.0, which the company says is the “first Enterprise Mobile Management (EMM) solution to include individual file encryption, integrated AV and web filtering,” visit Sophos.com.

AS