Will On Premises Security Become Irrelevant?

By Ericka Chickowski 1

A new survey out today from cloud security brokerage Bitglass shows that as public cloud app adoption continues to roll through enterprises, security will need to become table stakes for adoption road maps. But as things stand, it still remains up in the air at many organizations, meaning the opportunity for channel partners is strong in a number of areas.

“Security is very much an unsolved issue for enterprises deploying public cloud apps. With massive planned adoption of apps that impact the entire organization — i.e. Office 365, security and compliance will be a precursor to adoption,” says Rich Campagna, vice president of products with Bitglass. “Many of these organizations are looking to trusted partners for guidance and best practices on how to proceed.”

Conducted among over 1,000 IT practitioners, the survey showed that 90 percent of organizations are very to moderately concerned about public cloud security. According to Campagna, many of the areas of highest concern were ‘basic blocking and tackling’ issues, namely access control and user identity management. For example, the number one concern was over unauthorized access, which was named by 63 percent of respondents.

However, many organizations are realistic about their own current on-premises security postures and cognizant of the security improvements made over the last few years by major SaaS providers to harden their infrastructures. As a result 40 percent of respondents believe that public cloud apps are as secure or more secure than their own on premises applications.

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This perception, along with the business benefits have 72 percent of respondents reporting that they’re planning to implement or actively implementing public cloud environments. Tops among the apps planned or currently deployed were Salesforce, Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps, Microsoft Exchange and Dropbox.  

As more data filters through these services, on premises security infrastructure is becoming deprecated. However, 60 percent of respondents report in the survey that consistent security with other IT infrastructure was one of the number one factors for cloud security in their evaluation process, followed by continuous protection, which was named by 58 percent as the top factor.

In order to maintain the security of data traversing all cloud providers, enterprises are increasingly looking to channel partners such as service providers and cloud brokers to provide the secure glue to integrate it all together.

“An increasing amount of corporate data moves outside of the firewall, traditional premises-based security infrastructure becomes irrelevant. Cloud-delivered security services are the ideal fit for securing data in these environments,” says Campagna. “The security ecosystem around public cloud applications is growing rapidly, representing more services and more opportunities for cloud brokers to engage with their customers.”