Survey Says, “Cloud Security is Still a Major Concern.”

Businesses everywhere are trying to move some – if not all – of their computing to the cloud, yet security remains as the #1 challenge for most companies.

This last week on Forbes.com, Louis Columbus posted the article, “Cloud Computing Survey: Security, Integration Challenge Growth.”

Louis covers all the main points discovered in the survey, but some key factors that stood out to me were:

• Nearly half (49% to be exact) of executive-level managers surveyed see cloud computing as transformational to their business strategies.
• The greatest perceived benefits to cloud computing are business continuity enablement (43%), increased flexibility to react to market conditions (40%), speed of deployment (39%), and improved customer service (38%).
• The three most important factors in selecting a SaaS app provider are the ability to configure and customize the cloud application to meet specific business needs (40%), consistent performance and availability (38%), and security certification of the SaaS provider (34%).
• Nearly 42% of cloud-based projects tend to come back in-house due to security concerns (65%), technical problems (64%), and sometimes the need for standardization (48%).
• Top three challenges of implementing a cloud strategy for IT typically surround security (66%), stability/reliability (47%), and ability of cloud solutions to meet industry standards (35%).

What concerns are you hearing about migrating to a cloud solution? Is security the biggest roadblock from allowing your organization to migrate fully to the cloud? Share your thoughts.