Organizations that use a cloud access security broker (CASB) are over 35% more likely to launch new products, speed time to market and expand to new markets.

That’s according to McAfee‘s new Cloud and Risk Adoption Report, which is focused on the business impact of cloud services and how organizations globally are addressing security gaps to accelerate their businesses with the cloud. McAfee surveyed 1,000 enterprise organizations globally and combined results with insights from billions of anonymized cloud events seen every month by McAfee’s CASB, Mvision Cloud.

Some 87% of companies experience business acceleration from their use of cloud services; however, only one in three companies surveyed uses a CASB.

Vittorio Viarengo, McAfee’s vice president of product for its cloud business, tells us relying on an MSSP can be a way to accelerate a company’s journey to the cloud.

McAfee’s Vittorio Viarengo

“We see this as a clear trend in our partners and customer base,” he said. “In the report, we highlighted the core security gaps customers are facing as they embark on this journey, like the ability to enforce data loss prevention, or control collaboration. We then found that when customers use a cybersecurity provider to get ahead of risk and fill those gaps, they use more cloud, and are more likely to experience benefits associated to business acceleration.”

The results demonstrate a wide range of benefits from cloud services, but there is a “clear divide” between companies that have addressed their shared responsibility for protecting data in the cloud and those that have not, according to McAfee.

The reason for this shortfall in cloud security probably is a combination of their cloud maturity, the “weight of their on-premises legacy, and training of their staff around cloud technology and how to address the shared responsibility model,” Viarengo said.

“What’s exciting about the data in this survey is that 52% of companies find the cloud to be more secure than on-prem,” he said. “So the rest of the 48% just need to catch up over time so they, too, can experience the same business acceleration benefits.”

Only a little more than one-third (36%) of organizations said they could enforce data-loss prevention in the cloud, and only 33% could control the collaboration settings that determine how their data is shared. In the case of IaaS, only one in four (26%) said they could audit configuration settings, widening the gap between risky and secure cloud adoption.

The research shines a light on organizations that are leading the charge in cloud adoption, prioritizing the security of their data as they roll out new cloud services and “winning in the market because of the actions they are taking,” said Rajiv Gupta, McAfee’s senior vice president of cloud security.