More than half (52 percent) of 2,200 cybersecurity professionals in a new survey say they think cloud applications are at least as secure as those running on a company’s in-house servers, according to survey authors Bitglass, a Campbell, Calif. data-protection firm. Only 40 percent felt that way a year ago, Bitglass said in releasing the survey, titled “The rise of purpose-built cloud security.”
Still, making apps accessible from an internet-connected device does pose risks of data loss and unauthorized access, Bitglass acknowledged. Some 53 percent of those surveyed cited unauthorized access as their biggest security threat, followed by data leakage (49 percent), data privacy (46 percent), account hijacking (44 percent) and insecure APIs (39 percent). About 60 percent said they fear traditional security software won’t protect cloud data.
Google is continuing to lose market share to Microsoft within the enterprise, with 61 percent of respondents using or planning an Office 365 deployment, up from 45 percent last year, the survey showed. Google Apps deployments in place or planned fell to 26 percent, from 29 percent.
