The 2016 ITWeb shadow IT survey found that security issues are the most significant perceived barrier to cloud use in respondents' organisations, said Nigel Hawthorn, director of EMEA marketing at Skyhigh Networks, at the ITWeb Security Summit 2016 in Midrand on Tuesday.
The survey also saw security rated the top concern with regards to choosing and implementing a cloud service, Hawthorn added.
Yet while businesses and IT departments take much care to select the cloud service providers least likely to compromise security, it is common for employees to unknowingly place important business data at risk by using popular free cloud services for office work, he warned.
Employees frequently use free cloud services aimed at individual consumers for tasks such as organising meetings, curating discussions, and compiling presentations, and these cloud services tend to offer much less data autonomy and security than those aimed at enterprises, Hawthorn said.
A high percentage of these kinds of cloud service do not specify that users maintain ownership and control of the data they upload, he noted.
While some IT staff are wise to this issue and accordingly block all the consumer cloud services they know of this can mean that employees work around this by using lesser-known and even riskier cloud services IT staff do not know about, he said.
A good idea to combat this problem is for IT staff to select company-approved cloud platforms to meet employees' office needs, and request that employees use these chosen services, while advising them of the risks of not doing so, Hawthorn suggested.
"Most of the time, [employees] aren't actually being malicious: they're just trying to get their jobs done, and cloud services are a great way to do that," he said.
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