McAfee, the device-to-cloud cybersecurity company, today released a special edition of its Cloud and Risk Adoption Report, focused on the business impact of cloud services and how organizations around the world are addressing security gaps to accelerate their businesses with the cloud. Cloud services are the most significant advance in IT since the introduction of the internet itself, and most organizations today benefit from the collaboration, scalability and cost-effectiveness enabled by the use of cloud services. With an increasing amount of sensitive data stored in the cloud, organizations are also finding challenges in managing their risk, which holds back many organizations from realizing their full potential.

McAfee surveyed 1,000 enterprise organizations worldwide and combined results with insights from billions of anonymized cloud events seen every month by McAfee’s CASB, MVISION Cloud. The results demonstrate that a wide range of organizations accelerate their business from the use of cloud services. However, there is a striking divide between organizations who have addressed their shared responsibility for protecting data in the cloud, and those who have not – organizations were over 35 percent more likely to launch new products, speed time to market, and expand to new markets with the cloud when proactively addressing security of their data in the cloud through the use of a CASB.

This edition of the McAfee Cloud Adoption and Risk Report also reveals the following:

Most sensitive data is under the IT team’s control: Results showed that 65 percent of enterprise data lives in collaboration and business software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, 25 percent in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and only 10 percent in “Shadow IT” unknown to the IT department. IT teams are subscribing to these cloud applications themselves, effectively fulfilling many employee needs that were previously unmet or were met through the use of “Shadow IT”.

Gap between secure enablement and cloud adoption: Only 36 percent of organizations said they could enforce data loss prevention in the cloud, and only 33 percent could control the collaboration settings that determine how their data is shared. In the case of IaaS, only 26 percent said they could audit configuration settings, widening the gap between risky and secure cloud adoption.

A minority of organizations experiencing the full potential of business acceleration: Although the likelihood of launching new products, speeding time to market and expanding to new markets is higher when a CASB is part of their cloud security strategy, only one in three companies surveyed are currently using one.

“This research shines a light on organizations who are leading the charge in cloud adoption, prioritizing the security of their data as they roll out new cloud services and winning in the market because of the actions they are taking,” said Rajiv Gupta, senior vice president, Cloud Security, McAfee. “Organizations often tell us how much faster their business moves when security is addressed in the cloud and it is exciting for us now to quantify this experience and share our data and recommendations with the rest of the market.”