Survey: IT Managers Tackle Cloud Apps Procurement

As organizations of all sizes adopt cloud computing services, many are beginning to take a more active role in evaluating cloud applications as part of the software procurement process. According to the annual SailPoint Market Pulse Survey, 63 percent of enterprises now require IT decision-makers to evaluate services during the procurement process.

However, just as businesses are starting to dive into the deep end of the cloud pool, the survey also indicates that they are not so quick to adopt security best practices around cloud. The survey indicated that many enterprises are adopting, or even mandating, cloud services, but many of those currently do not have the IT controls in place to properly manage them. It's creating increased risk of fraud, theft and privacy breaches.

One particularly interesting fact from the survey is that more than 50 percent of the respondents admitted they have experienced situations in the last year in which a terminated employee tried to access company data or applications after they left the organization. That's a significant number, and it just shows that there are some IT controls that are still not being properly implemented (whether it's cloud-related or not).

"There's no denying it; cloud and mobile technologies are becoming mainstream. But, as our survey indicates, enterprises are still 'catching up' to the required levels of oversight and control they need. With our survey finding that as many as 59 percent of mission-critical applications will be stored in the cloud by 2016, the need for better management of cloud and mobile access is only going to rise," said Jackie Gilbert, CMO and founder of SailPoint, in a prepared statement. "Organizations need to have automated policy and controls in place to monitor and manage user access across the entire enterprise — including mobile and cloud applications — in order to minimize security and compliance risk."

That's nothing new in the IT world. It wasn't all that many years ago that it was still easy to find organizations that had yet to deploy anti-virus software on their desktop PCs, after all. But considering the dispersion of data because of clouds and off-premise data centers, it's even more important to secure applications and data at all levels.

Gilbert noted that many organizations are still struggling with managing who has access to what apps and data across the enterprise. The survey indicated that the proliferation and cloud and mobile technologies is only making the situation worse.