What's This?

Virtualization is a strategic priority for IT decision makers at big companies, yet they are still not ready for the security challenges it brings, according to an October 2016 Bitdefender survey of 250 IT decision makers at US companies with more than 1,000 PCs.

Hybrid infrastructures -- a complex mix of on-premises and in-the-cloud data storage -- are fast becoming a major common architecture in the enterprise environment, and CIOs have to adapt to this new world.

Some 73% of IT decision makers fear their companies might have to pay financial compensation in the event of a security breach, while 66% even fear losing their jobs. Seven out of 10 IT decision makers replied they are “concerned” or “completely concerned” about managing security of hybrid infrastructures. The main security concerns when migrating data to a hybrid model are security of data in transit (66%), security of data at rest (60%), security of backups and snapshots (54%), and increased attack surface (53%).

Security of data in transit or at rest is CIOs’ main concern when shifting IT architectures toward a mix between the latest in public cloud services and their own private data centers. Bitdefender security specialists recommend that any data transfer between the client and the cloud service provider be encrypted to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks that could intercept and decipher broadcasted data. More than that, any data stored locally or in the cloud should be encrypted to make sure cybercriminals cannot read it, in case of unauthorized access.

Bitdefender’s survey also shows that the main security challenges after migrating to hybrid infrastructures are lack of visibility (51%), lack of policies (41%), and potential access from unauthorized devices (34%). CIOs also are concerned they will be unable to monitor workloads across clouds (47%), and 44% agree or strongly agree there is insufficient network control and monitoring in the cloud.

Companies are slowly joining the bandwagon of hybrid cloud adoption, but Gartner estimates that the technology is still three to five years away from going mainstream. By the end of 2015, only 15% of enterprises had adopted it so far, although the demand for hybrid cloud is estimated to be growing at a compound rate of 27% a year, outpacing overall IT market growth, according to researcher Markets and Markets. The company said it expects the hybrid cloud market to reach $85 billion in 2019, up from $25 billion in 2014. Read the full white paper here.