One in seven of over 350 companies polled by access assurance firm Courion admitted that, although there were potential access violations in their cloud applications, they did not know how to find them.
The survey also found widespread confusion about who is responsible for securing cloud data, with 78.4% of respondents unable to answer that question.
Nearly two-thirds of respondents said the company from which the data originates, the application provider, and the cloud service provider were all responsible, while another 13% said they were not sure.
Almost half of respondents said they were not confident that a compliance audit of their cloud-based applications would show that all user access was appropriate.
According to Forrester, the market-driven requirement for cloud computing adoption will fuel the rapid evolution of security solutions and see the emergence of highly secure and trusted cloud services.
Forrester predicts that by 2015, security will shift from being the top inhibitor of cloud to one of the top enablers and drivers of cloud services adoption.
This article was first published by Computer Weekly