Findings suggest that on average only around 40 per cent of the data stored in the cloud across the world is secured with encryption and key management solutions. The UK is particularly bad in this regard, ranking alongside Brazil (34 per cent) and Japan (34 per cent) with a relatively paltry 35 per cent.
The country which emerges most favourably from the study is Germany, with 61 per cent of organisations stating that they secure sensitive information being stored in the cloud environment. Interestingly given the attitude of the companies in countries mentioned above, over half of global organisations also believe that payment information and customer information are potentially at risk when stored in this way.
Speaking of the findings, Jason Hart, CTO, data protection at Gemalto said: "While it's good to see some countries like Germany taking the issue of cloud security seriously, there is a worrying attitude emerging elsewhere. This may be down to nearly half believing the cloud makes it more difficult to protect data, when the opposite is true.
"The benefit of the cloud is its convenience, scalability and cost control in offering options to businesses that they would not be able to access or afford on their own, particularly when it comes to security.
“However, while securing data is easier, there should never be an assumption that cloud adoption means information is automatically secure. Just look at the recent Accenture and Uber breaches as examples of data in the cloud that has been left exposed."
According to Gemalto 95 per cent of companies across the globe have adopted cloud services. The findings were part of a commissioned study carried out by the Ponemon Institute involving over 3,000 IT and IT security practitioners.
