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Cloud Computing: Rogue Clouds Bring Unexpected Costs and Security Issues
Rogue Clouds refer to the unapproved use of cloud services within an organization. Rogue clouds increasingly are causing security issues and resulting unplanned for expenses.
A report by Symantec finds that 77 percent of all businesses have been hit with unexpected costs related to cloud technology. When broken down by business size, 83 percent of companies affected are large while 70 percent of the companies are small and medium sized businesses.
Why do Rogue Clouds happen? The most common reason is time efficiency. By going to the cloud, business groups find that they can gain access to on-line services and tools in significantly shorter periods of time compared to how long it might take if they went through the much longer review and approval cycle controlled by a central IT group. But the lack of up-front review and due diligence before using cloud services often results in long-term problems. 43 percent of businesses have lost data in the cloud because they couldn’t find it or because it was inadvertently deleted. 40 percent of rogue cloud projects have resulted in the unintentional exposure of confidential information. 25 percent have reported having their accounts and data hacked, stolen or hijacked.
The Symantec report also found cloud storage was poorly utilized by most companies. While it’s only necessary to ‘pay for what you use’ in the cloud, it still is necessary to provision a block of storage to work with. The report found that most companies vastly overprovision the amount of storage compared to what they really need. Best practice would be to using 50 percent or more of the provisioned storage, but most companies are using less than 17 percent of the cloud storage which they have available.
Francis deSouza, group president, Enterprise Products and Services at Symantec, said that “By taking control of cloud deployments, companies can seize advantage of the flexibility and cost savings associated with the cloud, while minimizing the data control and security risks linked with rogue cloud use.”
