87% enterprises experience business acceleration from cloud services: McAfee report

The report focuses on the business impact of cloud services and how organizations around the world are addressing security gaps to accelerate their businesses with the cloud. Cloud services are the most significant advance in IT since the introduction of the internet itself, and most organizations today benefit from the collaboration, scalability and cost-effectiveness enabled by its use. With an increasing amount of sensitive data stored in the cloud, organizations are also finding challenges in managing their risk, which holds back many organizations from realizing their full potential.

The report also found that the most sensitive data is under the IT team’s control. Results showed that 65% of enterprise data lives in collaboration and business software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, 25% in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and only 10% in “Shadow IT" unknown to the IT department. IT teams are subscribing to these cloud applications themselves, effectively fulfilling employee needs that were previously unmet or were met through the use of “Shadow IT".

The findings also showed a gap between secure enablement and cloud adoption. Only 36% organizations said they could enforce data loss prevention in the cloud, and only 33% could control the collaboration settings that determine how their data is shared. In the case of IaaS, only 26% said they could audit configuration settings, widening the gap between risky and secure cloud adoption.

McAfee also found that a minority of organizations are experiencing the full potential of business acceleration. Although the likelihood of launching new products, speeding time to market and expanding to new markets is higher when a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) is part of their cloud security strategy, only one in three companies surveyed are currently using one.

The report is based on a survey of 1,000 enterprise organizations worldwide and combined results with insights from billions of anonymized cloud events seen every month by McAfee’s CASB, MVISION Cloud. The results demonstrate that a wide range of organizations accelerate their business from the use of cloud services.