Securing your apps in the borderless cloud

Introduction

Public cloud continues to drive digital and business innovation. Organizations worldwide have enabled employees to work remotely and shifted to cloud and online computing to maintain collaboration and workflows. This rapid cloud adoption and reshaping of the global workforce has created new challenges and risks.

Indeed, security is a top public-cloud concern. In a recent Barracuda study, 70% of respondents said security concerns restrict their organization’s adoption of public cloud. An overwhelming 96% said they’d increase their adoption of public cloud if barriers were removed.

Network integrations are also an area of concern, including integration of public cloud with legacy technologies, integration with private cloud, and integration with on-premises infrastructures.

This year’s pandemic and the resulting reality of work from home have really driven home the importance of applications and the internet. A significant majority of office workers across the world have had to “remote-in” to their digital workplaces over the internet, and this has in turn led to a boom in public cloud adoption. Digital transformation that was already in full swing has received a boost like no other. Workplaces have had to remove their older workflows and rapidly move them to a digital form or perish. These changes have led to many organizations moving to the public cloud, taking advantage of the speed of deployment.

This move to the cloud and the ongoing movement and evolution of applications creates new risks. New strategies and solutions are required to help mitigate these risks, and careful attention must be given to secure the growing application threat vector.

This report takes an in-depth look at public cloud, adoption trends, security concerns, app vulnerabilities, and a variety of related issues contrasting the responses from APAC and the rest of the world.

Methodology

Barracuda commissioned independent market researcher Vanson Bourne to conduct a global survey of 750 IT decision makers who are responsible for their organizations’ cloud infrastructure. Survey participants from the U.S., EMEA and APAC represented organizations of all sizes from a broad range of industries. The survey was fielded in February 2020.