Survey reveals public sector firms rather reluctant to adopt cloud

Netwrix, a vendor of information security and governance software, released findings from the 2019 Netwrix Cloud Data Security Report which revealed that the number of public sector organizations that are ready to implement a cloud-first strategy or move their entire infrastructures to the cloud has decreased by almost 20 percent since 2018.

In fact, only 32 percent of government organizations would consider implementing a cloud-first strategy, and only 20 percent would consider becoming 100 percent cloud. The main reason they cited is lack of resources: 92 percent of IT teams didn't receive a budget increase for cloud security in 2019, and 50 percent of them say they have no financial support when it comes to dealing with cloud security issues.

• The majority of government organizations store personally identifiable information (PII) of employees and citizens in the cloud (69 percent and 62 percent , respectively). Their chief reasons for moving sensitive data to the cloud are cost efficiency (31 percent), availability for remote workers (28 percent) and security concerns (21 percent).
• 28 percent of government organizations had at least one security incident in the past 12 months.
• The majority of organizations plan to strengthen data security in the cloud by encrypting data (61 percent) and improving data access management (55 percent).
• One quarter of organizations that store all their sensitive data in the cloud would consider moving some or all of back on premises. The key reasons to uncloud include high costs (43 percent), inability to ensure security (29 percent) and lack of control (14 percent). They would start by migrating the data of citizens (29 percent), payment data (29 percent) and healthcare data (29 percent).

"Public sector organizations need to understand what data they have in the cloud and ensure they can classify it according to its level of sensitivity. This approach will enable them to prioritize their cybersecurity efforts and choose appropriate controls within their budgets to keep critical data safe," said Steve Dickson, CEO of Netwrix.