Years ago, tech experts predicted that a new wave of technology would hit the scene and completely rework the way we, well, work. Cloud computing was viewed as the future of the enterprise – at the time, this mysterious yet highly intriguing concept promised to dramatically increased efficiencies that would enable companies to reduce costs and increase business flexibility. Fast forward to today – there’s a good chance that many of you reading this blog post have already deployed (or are seriously considering) some form of cloud computing within your organization.

Here at WinMagic, we’ve watched the increasing adoption of cloud computing – our customers are migrating parts (if not all) of their business to public, private and hybrid cloud environments. As these pieces of business make their way into virtual storage settings, we can’t help but to grow more and more concerned for the security of these critical assets. We were so concerned that we actually developed a new security software that can encrypt virtual machines running on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms.

In the midst of undertaking the development of SecureDoc CloudVM, we took a step back to better understand the inner workings of just how organizations are going about securing data in cloud computing environments. We enlisted the help of Spiceworks in December 2015 for more insight – they conducted an online survey, completed by 150 U.S.-based IT professionals, of respondents that worked for organizations that were currently using, or planning to use, cloud computing services or solutions.

The data collected and returned back to us confirmed exactly what we were dreading:

• On average, 40% of the data stored in cloud infrastructure solutions is sensitive/proprietary and less than half (YIKES) (49%) of all the data stored in these solutions is encrypted.
• Of the total number of respondents, only approximately one-third encrypt data (or plan to encrypt data) at the disk/device level in cloud infrastructure environments.

Thankfully, though:

• While most organizations (58%) primarily rely on their cloud infrastructure solution providers to secure their data, they also have practices in place to help secure their data should a breach occur.

Based on the data reported, we wanted to share 3 best practices for those of you contemplating (or already leveraging) the cloud:

• Do more to protect your virtualize data.
• By “more” we mean invest in the right security solutions.
• Being compliant does not guarantee that you are secure.

SecureDoc CloudVM is an enterprise encryption solution that supports Windows-based platforms running in public, private and hybrid cloud environments through application aware intelligent key management. This type of management offers a single pane of glass view into where and how encryption is deployed across the environment. IT administrators can control their entire encryption key management system across endpoints, file servers, virtual servers, enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) solutions and Internet of Things (IoT) instances.

SecureDoc CloudVM wipes away the challenges faced by IT pros when it comes to protecting multiple encrypted layers and managing associated keys. SecureDoc CloudVM leaves no excuse to the 49% of IT pros that still aren’t encrypting their virtual data.