IT professionals also have concerns about cloud service providers.

Data security is creating fear and trust issues for IT professionals, according to the third-annual Oracle and KPMG Cloud Threat Report 2020. The study of 750 cybersecurity and IT professionals across the globe found that a patchwork approach to data security, misconfigured services and confusion around new cloud security models has created a crisis of confidence that will only be fixed by organisations making security part of the culture of their business.

The study found that IT professionals are three times more concerned about the security of their company’s data than the security of their own home. They also have concerns about cloud service providers; 80% are concerned that cloud service providers they do business with will become competitors in their core market; 75% of IT professionals view the public cloud as more secure than their own data centres, yet 92% of them do not believe their organisation is well-prepared to secure public cloud services; nearly 80% of IT professionals say that recent data breaches experienced by other businesses have increased their organisation’s focus on securing data moving forward.

Businesses are moving more business-critical workloads to the cloud than ever before, but growing cloud consumption has created new blind spots as IT teams and cloud service providers work to understand their individual responsibilities in securing data. This confusion has left IT security teams scrambling to address a growing threat landscape. Nearly 90% of companies are using software-as-a-service (SaaS) and 76% are using infrastructure-as-a-service today (IaaS); 50% expect to move all their data to the cloud in the next two years.

“The lift-and-shift of critical information to the cloud over the last couple of years has shown great promise, but the patchwork of security tools and processes has led to a steady cadence of costly misconfigurations and data leaks. Positive progress is being made, though,” said Steve Daheb, senior vice president, Oracle Cloud. “Adopting tools that leverage intelligent automation to help close the skills gap are on the IT spend roadmap for the immediate future and the C-level is methodically unifying the different lines of business with a security-first culture in mind.”