Cloud security immaturity challenges Brazilian firms

Brazilian companies are struggling with issues related to cloud security as they just cannot keep up with advances in the area, according to a new report.

Some 78 percent of Brazil-based businesses polled reported having been targeted by attacks as a result of lack of maturity around cloud data security, above the global average of 73 percent, according to the Cloud Security Threat Report study by Symantec.

According to the report, about 65 percent of the firms surveyed believe their data is already available for sale on the Dark Web and fear future security issues as a result of cloud migrations.

A key challenge mentioned by 90 percent of the study participants is lack of visibility of cloud workloads.

Some 55 percent of all businesses have already shifted all their workloads to the cloud, but over half (54 percent) found their security teams struggle to keep up with the rapid rate of expansion of application portfolios in the cloud.

The migration of systems to cloud environments is a key priority for IT decision-makers in Brazil as a means to resume innovation initiatives, according to a separate study by analytics firm SAS.

However, the main concern for the Brazilian companies in terms of migrating applications away from physical datacenters is information security, followed by data synchronization.

According to research from the BSA, The Software Alliance, cloud adoption in emerging markets such as Brazil is still lagging behind, mainly down to the lack of standards around cybersecurity.