Gigaom Research And CipherCloud Release "Shadow IT: Data Protection And Cloud Security" Findings

SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov. 17, 2014/PRNewswire/ -- Gigaom Research and CipherCloud, the leader in cloud visibility and data protection, today announced 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."

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," saidPaige 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." 

About CipherCloud:

CipherCloud, the leader in cloud visibility and data protection, delivers cloud adoption acceleration while ensuring security, compliance and control. CipherCloud's open platform provides comprehensive cloud application discovery and risk assessment, data protection – strong encryption, tokenization, data loss prevention, key management and malware detection – and extensive user activity and anomaly monitoring services.

CipherCloud has experienced exceptional growth and success with millions and millions of business users, across 26 countries, and in more than 11 industries.

The CipherCloud product portfolio protects popular cloud applications out-of-the-box such as Salesforce, Box, Microsoft Office 365, and ServiceNow.

CipherCloud, named as SC Magazine's 2013 Best Product of the Year, technology is FIPS 140-2 validated and is backed by premier venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and T-Venture, the venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom. For more information, visit www.ciphercloud.com and follow us on Twitter @ciphercloud.

CipherCloud Contact:
Lise Feng
Director of Corporate Communications
408-520-4937
lfeng@ciphercloud.com

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SOURCE CipherCloud, Inc.