Cloud Security Concerns at Enterprises Could Affect Open Platform Adoption

In the annals of enterprise open source adoption, concerns over security have always been present. In fact, there are many enterprises that still don't allow their users to use open source browsers like Firefox, or use phones based on Android. Ask the IT department personnel at these companies what's up, and they'll tell you that they don't trust these platforms and applications to be secure.

This week, data from researchers turned up evidence that concerns over security are especially strong in the cloud computing space, and these concernes could have an impact on adoption rates for platforms like OpenStack and CloudStack.

As noted on Talkin' Cloud:

"Bitglass' 'Cloud Adoption Report' noted that 52 percent of large companies and one-third of small and medium businesses (SMBs) are not moving to the cloud because of security concerns. But not only that, concerns about security are not only not decreasing; they're increasing. A previous report from October 2011 indicated 25 percent of businesses expressed some concern over cloud security, but that figure increased to 42 percent in July 2013."

"Because larger companies have more-established IT processes, they generally have a higher amount of paranoia with respect to cloud security issues. However, they also have the largest economic gains to be had from moving to cloud," said Nat Kausik, CEO of Bitglass, in a statement.

Meanwhile, there is also market research out showing that cloud security concerns within IT departments are not unfounded.  The 2014 Cloud Security Report by security-as-a-service firm Alert Logic includes analysis of responses from administrators of cloud and on-premise infrastructures at 2,200 organizations. The study found that in the past year, brute force attacks on cloud environments climbed from 30 percent to 44 percent of customers, and vulnerability scans increased from 27 percent to 44 percent.

 The study also found that malware botnet attacks are increasing in cloud environments, gaining from 5 percent to 11 percent over the past 12 months.

Of course, we've been covering many other studies that show that IT departments are considering deploying open source cloud platforms such as OpenStack. The OpenStack Foundation's survey found that many enterprises intend to deploy OpenStack this year.

However, security is likely to rise to the top among cloud computing concerns at these enterprises, and it could have an impact on which kinds of cloud service providers enterprises end up trusting. All the data rolling in points to the fact that cloud security concerns are significantly rising at enterprises, not falling.