Gigaom Research and CipherCloud Announce Results of "Shadow IT: Data Protection and Cloud Security" Findings

San Jose, CA, November 17, 2014 (Newswire.com) - Gigaom Research and CipherCloud announced today the results of their "Shadow IT: Data Protection and Cloud Security" study. The research examined the extent of enterprises' cloud adoption, their challenges and security concerns and growing prevalence of shadow IT. 

"Organizations are moving beyond curiosity about the cloud to actual deployment," said George Crump, Gigaom Research analyst. "SaaS is growing at 199 percent and is the typical home for shadow IT. It is growing because end-users are impatient with IT and looking for alternatives."

"Organizations are moving beyond curiosity about the cloud to actual deployment. SaaS is growing at 199 percent and is the typical home for shadow IT. It is growing because end-users are impatient with IT and looking for alternatives."

George Crump, Gigaom Research analyst

Adoption of the Cloud is Accelerating

The results of the study indicate that cloud market will grow 126.5 percent this year with the majority of the growth in two areas - Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) growing at 199 percent and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) at 126 percent. 

Top Risks Identified with Cloud Adoption

Security is the number one cloud adoption concern with 62 percent selecting is as the top concern. Second at 44 percent were the performance of those applications, and third at 41 percent was the time needed to develop cloud related skills. The study found that IT professional consider encryption as the key aspect of security. By encryption it must be end to end from the moment that the data leaves the network to the data being stored at rest in the cloud.

Number of Cloud Applications Adopted 

Over half of survey respondents reported that they had more than 10 cloud applications in production, with a notable 32 percent indicating significant use of 51 or more cloud applications. This only includes the cloud applications that IT is aware of and controls; it does not include shadow IT cloud instances.

Growth of Shadow IT 

One of the big challenges is have visibility into cloud adoption within their organization. Among line of business employees, 81 percent admitted to using unauthorized SaaS applications. 38 percent of employees deliberately went around IT in adopting applications because IT approval process in their companies is reportedly too slow.

Most Popular Cloud Applications

The study revealed that the most commonly requested cloud applications were those related to communications, file sync-and-share and disaster recovery, followed rapidly by CRM and other sales automation tools. 

"The research underscores the rapid adoption of the cloud by businesses both by IT and line of business employees," said Paige Leidig, Chief Marketing Officer, CipherCloud. "It also reinforces security as a key concern and the importance of encryption to ensure data is fully protected and controlled."