Time to read:  3 minutes

Meet the Cloud Pioneers, the group of enterprises leading the way with Cloud adoption.  They are distinguished from their colleagues, Cloud Planners and Cloud Stragglers in many ways.  Mainly, their difference..the Pioneers have less, not more security concerns.

With the news announcing new and major security breaches every week, you can’t help but wonder how this could possibly be the case.

It’s simple.

When Cloud Pioneers prepare for Cloud deployment, tops on the list is upgrading security. And implementing encryption.

For this reason, Pioneers are way less concerned with security.  This compares to Stragglers, where security truly limits their adoption.

The highest ranking for a security concern, which is “Reduced control/visibility for security” is 8^th for Pioneers, tying with “Technology not yet proven.”  This is because Pioneer’s upgrade security prior to their Cloud deployment.  Because of these projects, for Pioneers, all security concerns rank in the bottom half of the list.

For Stragglers, it’s a different story.  Of their concerns, all security concerns we asked about rank in the top half.  After costs, lack of trusted third parties to help them, and the perception that it’s an unproven technology, security concerns are the real barrier for this group.

It all suggests big opportunity for security vendors.  Getting enterprises to completely take advantage of the cloud means security vendor marketing needs to ease fears of the mainstream market.

The next question becomes:  What will happen in the security vendor space?  We’ll always have breaches, cloud security concerns, and larger investment in security.  With growing mobility comes new endpoints to secure.  At the same time, cloud is giving rise to develop of new and more cost-effective security apps to secure both new and existing endpoints.

Going forward, we predict that enterprises are about to have an enormous choice of ways to secure their IT operations.  While their cloud security concerns are well-founded now, we’re confident that the industry will overcome them.