There was a time few enterprises would have expected to have their mission-critical applications running in the cloud, but that seems to be changing. Recent research released by SailPoint indicates that one in three enterprise mission-critical apps are currently in the cloud. Perhaps even more surprising is SailPoint expects that ratio to jump up to one in two by 2015.
SailPoint interviewed 200 business leaders responsible for various key business departments and 200 IT decision-makers at businesses with at least 5,000 employees for its 2012 SailPoint Market Pulse Survey.
According to SailPoint, as enterprises continue to adopt the cloud, they are becoming increasingly at risk. Part of this is because even though business users have gained more autonomy to deploy cloud applications without IT involvement (an issue IT departments everywhere struggle with), those same users don’t feel responsible for managing access control. Most (70 percent) of business leaders believe that access control is still ultimately responsible for managing user access to cloud applications — apparently even if they have little say or control over the services being used. Can you hear that sound? It’s the sound of a million IT pros facepalming at the same time.
Of course, the ridiculousness of the idea doesn’t do anything to change the fact that it’s a constant problem IT departments, whether internal or outsourced, are facing on a daily basis. But wait, it gets worse. Of the business leaders surveyed, 14 percent admitted they have no way of knowing if sensitive data is being stored in the cloud at all.