Cloud computing adoption is on the rise in
Hong Kong and China, according to ISACA.
Around 20 percent of enterprises plan to use
it for non-mission-critical IT services this year, doubling the number from
last year.
The number of enterprises that plan to use
cloud for mission-critical services rose from 7 percent to 11 percent, and
those that do not use cloud for any IT services has decreased by 6 points to 41
percent.
With the China economy growing at a rapid
pace, enterprises’ needs for agility and scalability have never been greater.
Cloud computing certainly fits the bill, and there is no surprise to see cloud
adoption increasing so quickly here,” said Michael Yung, president of the ISACA
China Hong Kong Chapter.
Many C-suite decision makers have
commissioned their IT professionals to carefully assess the applicability and
analyze the risk against benefits for deploying cloud technology. The next 12
months will be interesting, as a number of them will start to deploy cloud
computing in areas they think will reap benefits to the organizations,” Yung
added.
Today, enterprises need to place stronger
emphasis on and better align three levels of governance, namely corporate, IT
and data governance. They hold the key to the mitigation of cloud-related
risks.
The 2011 ISACA IT Risk/Reward Barometer also
found that 40 percent of the information security and IT audit professionals in
Hong Kong and China believe the risk of employees using personal mobile devices
for work activities outweigh the benefits, with 33 percent believing that mobile
devices owned by employees pose the greatest risk, compared to 29 percent who
chose work-supplied flash drives as riskiest.
More than 70 percent of respondents reported
that their enterprises have a security policy in place for mobile computing,
yet, 39 percent believe that there is a need to update or better communicate
theirs. In light of this, 35 percent view that increasing risk awareness among
employees is the most important action that enterprises should take to improve
IT risk management.
