Early Results: Linux.com IT Security Poll

Cloud computing has proven to be much more than a buzzword. According to Gartner, the cloud services market is forecast to reach $148.8 billion by 2014. CIOs from a variety of industries are looking to the cloud to increase efficiencies in the enterprise while cutting resource costs. As part of this evolution, companies are closely investigating the security concerns related to cloud computing.

The Linux.com community this month has been weighing in on whether or not security concerns differ at all when deploying on-premise vs. cloud computing systems. This is part of the four-week IT security poll sponsored by Centrify.

We want to thank the Linux.com community for its help to better understand security challenges in the enterprise and today are sharing the results of the first two poll questions with you. We asked the same question with regard to both on-premise and cloud computing deployments: “What’s your primary security concern.”

It is clear among Linux.com members that sysadmins are thinking about all security threats all the time, with roughly 40 percent of respondents choosing “all of the above” when asked which security threat is of primary concern. They simply couldn’t choose just one.

The results conclude that security concerns don’t vary much between on-premise and cloud computing. For both kinds of systems, poll participants said ‘protecting against external threats’ (27% for on-premise and 30.3% for cloud) and addressing ‘insider misuse of root or other privileged accounts’ (10.7% for on-premise and 8.3% for cloud) were their primary concerns.

The number of people who chose the ‘external threat’ concern far exceeded those that chose other options on the poll. While insider attacks have garnered a lot of attention in recent years, the increasing sophistication of hackers from around the world and public stories about external breaches have not gone unnoticed by the Linux.com community.

The poll results did indicate that Linux.com community members are more concerned with passing compliance audits when it comes to cloud-based systems, with nearly double the number of participants ranking this as the primary concern than with on-premise computing. As cloud computing matures, we would expect this to become less of an issue but for the time being, companies appear to remain hesitant about being able to answer questions like: Where is the information stored? Who has access to it, and what can they access?

Thanks again to the community for sharing your opinions with us! The survey has a couple of week left with this week’s question live now. Please weigh in and help us learn from you, the Linux users and Guru’s.