Do Cloud Computing Services Make Data Loss More Costly?

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Shawn Drew.

It has been repeatedly claimed that a migration to cloud computing services will bring with it productivity and collaborative gains at the expense of data security, since the data is being managed by a third party. However, the cost of that increased security risk has never been quantified until now, in a new report from Netskope and the Ponemon Institute. Midsize businesses should take note of the report’s findings, but they should also approach these numbers with the requisite grain of salt.

Hidden Dangers With Cloud Computing Services

The data comes from a survey of over 600 cloud-aware IT professionals who attempted to quantify the "cloud multiplier effect," the cloud’s added risk of a costly data breach. As detailed in a recent eWEEK article, the report found that in certain situations — for example, when there is a 50 percent increase in the use of cloud-based storage of sensitive information — the expected cost of a data breach can increase by more than 200 percent…

Part of the reason why the expected cost of data breaches is so high is due to how businesses currently interact with the cloud. The survey found that almost 70 percent of businesses fail to classify the data by importance before making the decision to move to the cloud. Furthermore, the survey found that almost half of all applications have migrated, in one way or another, to the cloud, yet fully half of those applications are not managed or even visible to the IT department…

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