‘49% of Indian organisations are not likely to secure sensitive data in cloud’

While an overwhelming majority of global firms have adopted cloud services, there is still a wide gap in the level of security precautions applied by them, a survey has revealed.
Almost half of Indian organisations say they are not likely to secure sensitive data in the cloud, according to the 2018 Global Cloud Data Security survey by global digital security firm Gemalto.
Globally, organisations said that only two-fifths of the data stored in the cloud is secured with encryption and key management solutions, it said.
The survey said that there is a gap in awareness within businesses about the services being used.
Only a quarter (25 per cent) of IT and IT security practitioners revealed that they are confident and they know all the cloud services their business is using.
The survey was conducted by the Ponemon Institute on behalf of Gemalto with 3,285 IT and IT security practitioners being surveyed across the US (575), the UK (405), Australia (244), Germany (492), France (293), Japan (424), India (497) and Brazil (355).
It revealed that almost half (49 per cent) of Indian organisations are not likely to secure sensitive data in the cloud, reflecting limited trust in cloud governance and security practices.
Globally, it found that organisations in India (49 per cent), Australia (43 per cent) and Japan (31 per cent) are less cautious than those in Germany (61 per cent) when sharing sensitive and confidential information stored in the cloud with third parties.
The majority (61 per cent) of German organisations revealed that they secure sensitive or confidential information while being stored in the cloud environment, ahead of the US (51 per cent), India (49 per cent) and Japan (50 per cent).
More than half respondents said that payment information (54 per cent) and customer data (49 per cent) are at risk when stored in the cloud.
Over half (57 per cent) of global organisations also believe that using the cloud makes them more likely to fall foul of privacy and data protection regulations, slightly down from 62 per cent in 2016, it added.
Due to this perceived risk, almost all (88 per cent) believed that the new General Data Protection Regulation will require changes in cloud governance, with two in five stating it would require significant changes.
Three-quarters of global respondents (75 per cent) also said that it is more complex to manage privacy and data protection regulations in a cloud environment than on premise networks, with France (97 per cent) and the US (87 per cent) finding this the most complex, just ahead of India (83 per cent), it said.
“While it is good to see some countries like Germany taking the issue of cloud security seriously, its a worrying in rest of the world. This may be down to nearly half believing the cloud makes it more difficult to protect data, when the opposite is true,” Gemalto’s CTO, Data Protection, Jason Hart said.