According to cybersecurity company Netwrix, 54% of companies that use cloud data storage had cybersecurity incidents in 2020, down from 77% in 2019. The most common security issues reported were phishing (40%), ransomware and malware (24%), and data leakage (17%). While 49% of the 937 IT professionals polled said their organization did not face serious consequences from these security incidents, 11% were forced to pay compliance fines and 8% said they lost competitive edge.
As a result, more than half of respondents said they needed to acquire extra budget to address the security issues, 62% said that their organization plans to remove or had already removed data from the cloud, and 6% changed their company’s senior leadership. The percentage of organizations that store non-sensitive data in the cloud also dropped from 57% in 2019 to 46% in 2020, and those that store customer data in the cloud dropped from 50% to 44%. The top data security challenges cited were lack of IT staff (52%), insufficient budget (47%) and lacking cloud security expertise (44%).