
Skyhigh Networks, a cloud security company based in California, recently sent out its Cloud Adoption and Risk Report which says that enterprise cloud adoption has increased by 43%. The report gathers data from over 15 million enterprise employees. The report conducted by Skyhigh polled over 350 different organizations. Skyhigh is saying that this report is the most complete report on cloud usage stats of its kind.
Kamal Shah, VP of Products and Marketing at Skyhigh Networks, said in an interview, “2014 will go down as the year of the cloud’s arrival as a fundamental tool for the Global 5000 enterprise.” In relation to poll, Shah mentions, “The average employee uses 27 cloud services, many of which represent unsanctioned or shadow IT and highlight the growing risk and opportunity for IT teams to securely enable cloud services within their organizations.”
Skyhigh’s report also breaks down annual stats from 2014 for each company found to be using cloud services. Skyhigh reorganized the data so that top cloud services could be viewed by category. In the fourth quarter of 2014, Skyhigh found that each company polled had an average of 897 cloud services in use. When polled in 2013, the number sat at 626. When looking at the categories that received the most growth, development services hosted in the cloud such as GitHub took the top spot. Cloud collaboration came in 2nd with many companies seeing an increase in adaptation. The cloud collaboration usage category grew 53% between the release of the 2013 and 2014 reports.
The report highlights many trends within cloud adaptation and cloud security. One of the more notable nuggets of info from the report is that Skyhigh claims that 92% of organizations have at least one compromised login credential. This category is broad, due to the fact that so many users reuse the same passwords. Skyhigh found that 31% of passwords are reused on other websites. This poses a problem for sensitive corporate data if that specific persons credentials were stolen from another website. The hackers could use social engineering techniques, learn more about their target, find their corporate webmail portal and use the stolen login credentials to login and begin collecting data.
More findings in Skyhigh’s report can be found here.