Dive Brief:

• Security remains the top concern of cybersecurity professionals when moving to the cloud, and limited security staff and outdated security tools are exacerbating those concerns, according to the 2017 Cloud Security Report released Wednesday by Crowd Research Partners.

• Three-quarters of survey respondents indicated that traditional security solutions either don’t work at all in the cloud or don’t work to the company’s required needs. That’s up almost 20% compared to the 2016 report.

• Finding qualified security staff is the second biggest barrier to cloud adoption, according to the survey of more than 1,900 cybersecurity professionals. More than half of organizations are attempting to solve this by training their current IT staff, while others are turning to managed service providers, leveraging software solutions or hiring new dedicated security staff.

Dive Insight:

Cloud providers offer their own security measures, but when it comes to cloud, the customer is ultimately responsible for ensuring their own data, applications and services are secure. But not all companies realize that a cloud migration can also introduce new security challenges that require both capabilities and skills to manage.

Companies that look to solve the problem by hiring new staff could face challenges, as cloud skills are some of the most in-demand skills among IT professionals. Concern among IT leaders about the lack of resources and expertise in cloud grew from 27% in 2015 to 32% in 2016, according to a recent cloud computing survey by RightScale.

Technologies that evolve faster than the security measures designed to protect them are a continuing challenge for all types of businesses. Most of today’s security tools were not designed for cloud environments.