How the cloud is leaving two thirds of organisations vulnerable in ANZ

Bitglass released the 2018 Cloud Adoption Report, its fourth such study, which examines the cloud applications used in more than 135,000 organisations around the globe.

The report corroborates what is now broadly apparent, the flexibility, productivity and cost savings benefits of cloud apps have fueled widespread adoption in every industry.

Surprisingly, the report finds that the adoption of cloud security technologies lags cloud adoption, leaving many at risk of a data breach.   While 81% of organisations worldwide and 84% of organisations in Australia and New Zealand are leveraging cloud productivity suites, relatively few are securing their use of cloud with single sign-on (SSO).

Despite the fact that SSO is a critical security tool in the enterprise, about two-thirds of organisations are failing to utilise it in Australia and New Zealand.   In addition to revealing adoption metrics for single sign-on, Bitglass' 2018 Cloud Adoption Report uncovers deployment rates for a host of different cloud-based tools, including Office 365, G Suite, AWS, Slack, Box, and Salesforce.   Key findings:

• The analysis of more than 135,000 organisations indicates that global cloud adoption has topped 81%, a 37% increase since 2016 and a 238% increase since 2014. In Australia and New Zealand, cloud adoption has reached 84%.
• Just over a quarter of Australian and New Zealand organisations now use SSO solutions, a mere one-third of those using the cloud. This disparity suggests that two-thirds of companies in the region will suffer from breaches related to improper authentication.
• Office365 now boasts more than twice as many deployments as G Suite worldwide. In Australia and New Zealand the trend holds, G Suite usage stands at 27% while Office 365 adoption has reached 57%.
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) has emerged as the go-to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution. While 13.8% of companies worldwide are using AWS, those in Australia and New Zealand seem more eager to leverage Amazon's IaaS offering, boasting a 22% adoption rate.

Using internally developed technologies, the Bitglass research team scanned more than 135,000 companies in order to identify the cloud services that they use.

This automated analysis scrutinised cloud productivity suites like Office 365 and G Suite, top cloud applications ranging from messaging apps like Slack to file sync and share apps like Box, as well as single sign-on, an increasingly fundamental cloud security technology.