Up to 73 percent of U.S. service provides and 75 percent of those in Europe say that their cloud services do not substantially protect and secure customers' confidential data, reports eWeek. The findings were released as part of the Ponemon Institute's "Security of Cloud Computing Providers" report, which polled 103 cloud service providers in the United States and 24 in six European countries.

Even more interesting and shocking is the revelation that 62 percent of the providers in the U.S. (and 63 percent in Europe) are not confident that their cloud applications are secure. The likely reason for the appalling statistics? Polled vendors don't think it's their responsibility, and improving security is also thought to be a low priority with customers. What's more, the cavalier attitude may be attributed to the fact that their systems and applications are not always evaluated for security threats by customers prior to deployment.

As I have highlighted previously, Amazon's outage last month is a clear lesson that businesses should never treat their cloud vendors as infallible. Instead, companies need to invest in planning for contingencies--and as revealed by this study, also implement appropriate security measures.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at eWeek
- check out this article at Redmond Mag

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