‘Organizations Run 40 Percent of Their Workloads in the Public Cloud’

Organizations are, on average, running 40 percent of their workloads in the public cloud, and 89 percent are either already in various stages of implementing cloud, or plan to adopt public cloud within the next year, according to DivvyCloud’s 2019 State of Enterprise Cloud and Container Adoption and Security report.

AWS and Microsoft Azure would be the clear leaders in terms of adoption rate as organizations’ primary cloud solution, at 60 percent and 44 percent, respectively. 77 percent of respondents reported having two or more clouds, adding to the complexity of maintaining security and compliance.

“Modern services including public cloud, containers, serverless and microservices are helping enterprises innovate quickly and maintain a competitive position in the market,” said Brian Johnson, CEO and co-founder of DivvyCloud. “Companies should feel empowered to embrace these tools, but it is essential that they have a true understanding of the compliance and security implications, and employ the people, processes and systems needed to maintain a strong security posture.”

Data Protection Public Cloud

Findings include analysis of responses from nearly 2,000 enterprise IT professionals regarding their organizations’ adoption of cloud and container services, as well as their perceptions of the security risks associated with these services. Most respondents could not accurately identify the higher risk of misconfigurations in public cloud compared to traditional IT environments, indicating a lack of understanding of the security challenges associated with protecting data in the public cloud.

Additionally, more than one-third of respondents were unsure which standards were relevant to the governance of their organization’s cloud and container environments. The data also shows organizations are rapidly embracing self-service cloud access for developers and engineers, which fuels innovation, but also compounds potential security and compliance complications.

To sum up, key findings from DivvyCloud’s 2019 State of Enterprise Cloud and Container Adoption and Security report include:

  • Of the organizations leveraging AWS, 73 percent provide self-service access to developers or engineers for provisioning and configuring AWS instances. Similarly, 61 percent of organizations using Microsoft Azure provide self-service access, and 58 percent of Google Cloud Platform users provide self-service access
  • 77 percent of respondents reported having two or more clouds, adding to the complexity of maintaining security and compliance
  • 74 percent of respondents said they are moderately or highly concerned about the security of the public cloud
  • Less than half of respondents were able to accurately identify the risk of misconfiguration in public cloud as higher than the risk in traditional IT environments
  • 78 percent of respondents said their organizations are either already using containers or plan to implement containers in 2019. For those that already employ containers, 47 percent said Kubernetes was their organization’s primary service, and 14 percent cited it as a secondary container solution
  • AWS and Microsoft Azure are the clear leaders in terms of adoption rate as organizations’ primary cloud solution, at 60 percent and 44 percent, respectively

“Implementing multi-clouds and containers is a highly complex undertaking,” added Brian Johnson. “And where there is complexity and nuance, there is also an abundance of potential security gaps. Organizations need policies that span all clouds and a platform that can quickly automate remediation in real-time of policy violations and misconfigurations.”