Cloud Security Not Roadblock for Majority of C-Level

The fourth edition of the ITGI Global Survey Results has been posted by ISACA.

A total of 834 surveys were completed, of which 704 were received through the online survey and 130 were gathered by telephone. The surveys were conducted in the native language of the interviewees, and included Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Cloud is a murky term, but here are some highlights I found in the report.

Service providers already run, or will soon have, mission-critical technology for almost half of the executives surveyed:

60 percent use or are planning to use cloud computing for non-mission-critical IT services, and more than 40 percent use or are planning to use it for mission-critical IT services. For companies that do not have plans to use cloud computing the main reasons are data privacy and security concerns.

A whopping two-thirds do not see legacy infrastructure as an obstacle.

More than one-third of the survey respondents reported significant legacy infrastructure investments that are inhibiting their cloud computing plans

On the other hand, there are still areas of concern. Some applications are considered too risky by four-fifths of executives!

The use of Facebook or Twitter at work is not highly prized; only one out of five respondents believes that the benefits of employees using social networking outweigh the risks.

The report also differentiates responses by size of company.

Cloud computing-related concerns about security, data privacy and legacy infrastructure investments are generally higher in large enterprises than in small ones.

Although large enterprise concern about cloud are higher than in small, the survey also shows that IT “innovation” is more likely in a large enterprise.

Slightly more than half of large enterprises have implemented or plan to implement initiatives to promote IT innovation, compared with 40.3 percent of small enterprises.

Infrastructure and Platform (IaaS and PaaS) seem to be getting the green light, but Software (SaaS) services such as social networking still has not overcome privacy concerns for the vast majority of executives — more red than yellow. That makes sense to me. SaaS is the least transparent of the three levels and has a history of mistakes.

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