Majority of Australian firms lack cloud security

Two-thirds of Australian organisations are vulnerable to cloud data breaches, according to a new Bitglass report.

The 2018 Cloud Adoption Report shows that the flexibility, productivity and cost-savings benefits of cloud apps have fuelled widespread adoption in every industry.

However, the adoption of cloud security technologies lags cloud adoption, leaving many at risk of a data breach.

While 81% of organisations worldwide and 84% of organisations in Australia and New Zealand are leveraging cloud productivity suites, relatively few are securing their use of cloud with single sign-on (SSO). Despite the fact that SSO is a critical security tool in the enterprise, about two-thirds of organisations are failing to utilise it in Australia and New Zealand.

“Cloud adoption is showing no signs of slowing down in Australia and New Zealand, with SaaS productivity platforms like Office 365 now deployed in a majority of organisations in region,” said David Shephard, Vice President of Sales for Asia Pacific.

“Unfortunately, businesses still lack basic security functionality like SSO. The cloud-first enterprise can no longer afford to forego cloud-first security solutions.”

In addition to revealing adoption metrics for SSO, Bitglass’s 2018 Cloud Adoption Report uncovers deployment rates for a host of different cloud-based tools, including Office 365, G Suite, AWS, Slack, Box and Salesforce.

Key findings from the report include:

• The analysis of more than 135,000 organisations indicates that global cloud adoption has topped 81% — a 37% increase since 2016 and a 238% increase since 2014. In Australia and New Zealand, cloud adoption has reached 84%.
• Just over a quarter of Australian and New Zealand organisations (26%) now use SSO solutions, a mere one-third of those using the cloud (84% of organisations). This disparity suggests that two-thirds of companies in the region will suffer from breaches related to improper authentication.
• Office365 now boasts more than twice as many deployments as G Suite worldwide. In Australia and New Zealand the trend holds — G Suite usage stands at 27% while Office 365 adoption has reached 57%.
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) has emerged as the go-to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution. While 13.8% of companies worldwide are using AWS, those in Australia and New Zealand seem more eager to leverage Amazon’s IaaS offering, boasting a 22% adoption rate.
   

Using internally developed technologies, the Bitglass research team scanned more than 135,000 companies in order to identify the cloud services that they use. This automated analysis scrutinised cloud productivity suites like Office 365 and G Suite, top cloud applications ranging from messaging apps like Slack to file sync and share apps like Box, as well as SSO, an increasingly fundamental cloud security technology.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/freshidea

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