Information security professionals aren’t content with traditional IT security tools when it comes to protecting cloud infrastructure, a new survey finds.

A CloudPassage survey of more than 2,200 members of the cybersecurity community concluded that more than nine in 10 (91 percent) of the respondents’ organizations had security concerns about the public cloud, with 44 percent being “very concerned.”

And to follow that statistic, 84 percent of respondents said they were dissatisfied with traditional security tools.

“This makes perceived or real security risks the single biggest factor in terms of adoption of cloud computing, and possibly holding back what otherwise would be even faster adoption of cloud,” said Holger Schulze, the founder of the Information Security Community on LinkedIn. “It seems to me that the overwhelming benefits of cloud computing should drive organizations and security teams and vendors as an ecosystem to find a way to get cloud done properly and securely.”

Schulze and Ram Krishnan, CloudPassage’s chief product officer, said in a Wednesday webinar that securing cloud infrastructure in the current technological age requires new approaches and new tools. One of the words that came up frequently was “agility.”{ad}

“What’s needed to enable this transformation is on-demand, automated security that delivers a comprehensive set of controls right at the workload, no matter where it lives, in any combination of infrastructure models, at any scale,” Krishnan said. “CISOs now have the opportunity to help their businesses leapfrog their competition.”

Fitting into that idea was the survey’s finding that more than half (53 percent) of respondents are now using Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) as their cloud service-delivery model. Krishnan said IaaS is growing in popularity because businesses are looking for better flexibility and agility. Software-as-a-service models are used by three-fifths (61 percent) of the respondents, but Krishnan said the gap is narrowing.

“[SaaS] was the big wave 10-odd years ago, obviously led by people at Salesforce.com and others. What we’re seeing now is – the bigger wave is actually Infrastructure-as-a-Service,” he said. “The adoption of IaaS is actually gaining faster than SaaS, and we’re starting to see it catch up to it. Clearly, SaaS still leads in terms of the models that are being adopted.”

The survey interviewed members of LinkedIn’s Information Security Community. Most of the respondents’ companies (79 percent) were involved in cloud adoption, with 30 percent private, 25 percent public and 24 percent public. The survey also found that the top driver of cloud-security solutions is faster time to deployment.