Dive Brief:
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The majority of tech industry executives and leaders plan to foster a cloud-first strategy for enterprise applications next year, according to a new survey from Bitglass.
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The survey of 92 CIOs and IT leaders was conducted at the Gartner Symposium IT Expo last month. The findings were released Friday.
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Cloud is also helping CIOs save money, according to the survey. Half of the respondents said they reduced costs in 2015 as a result of using SaaS applications.
Dive Insight:
Security is still a significant concern when it comes to cloud, according to the report. In 2016, 87% of IT leaders said they expect to increase security spending. The biggest cloud security challenges of 2016 will be "controlling downloads, evaluating cloud provider security, external sharing and shadow IT," according to the survey.
"CIOs now realize that shadow IT is not an employee attempt at mutiny, but a response to the poor choice of tools provided by IT," said Rich Campagna, vice president of products and marketing at Bitglass. "As the cloud-first mindset has become more commonplace, security concerns have shifted to topics like access from unmanaged devices and external sharing — common gaps in cloud applications."
But the unauthorized use of applications is less frequent as more IT leaders embrace public cloud strategies, according to the findings.