McAfee, the device-to-cloud cybersecurity company, released a special edition of its “Cloud and Risk Adoption Report,” focused on the business impact of cloud services and how organizations around the world are addressing security gaps to accelerate their businesses with the cloud.

Cloud services are the most significant advance in IT since the introduction of the internet itself, and most organizations today benefit from the collaboration, scalability, and cost-effectiveness enabled by the use of cloud services. With an increasing amount of sensitive data stored in the cloud, organizations are also finding challenges in managing their risk, which holds back many organizations from realizing their full potential.

McAfee surveyed 1,000 enterprise organizations worldwide, of which 35% came from the APAC region, and combined results with insights from billions of anonymized cloud events seen every month by McAfee’s CASB, MVISION Cloud. The results demonstrate that a wide range of organizations accelerates their business from the use of cloud services. However, there is a striking divide between organizations who have addressed their shared responsibility for protecting data in the cloud, and those who have not — organizations within the APAC region were over 29% more likely to launch new products, speed time to market, and expand to new markets with the cloud when proactively addressing security of their data in the cloud through the use of a CASB.

Eighty-four percent of companies surveyed within APAC experience business acceleration from their use of cloud services.

The majority (55%) of organizations experience better security in the cloud than on-premise IT environments. Organizations are over 29% more likely to launch new products, speed time to market, and expand to new markets when they use a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) to protect their data in the cloud.

The report also found out that:

Most sensitive data is under the IT team’s control: Globally, results showed that 65% of enterprise data lives in collaboration and business software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, 25% in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and only 10% in “Shadow IT” unknown to the IT department. IT teams are subscribing to these cloud applications themselves, effectively fulfilling many employee needs that were previously unmet or were met through the use of “Shadow IT.”

The gap between secure enablement and cloud adoption: Within APAC, only 35% of organizations said they could enforce data loss prevention in the cloud, and only 36% could control the collaboration settings that determine how their data is shared. In the case of IaaS, only 27% said they could audit configuration settings, widening the gap between risky and secure cloud adoption.

A minority of organizations experiencing the full potential of business acceleration: Although the likelihood of launching new products, speeding time to market and expanding to new markets is higher when a CASB is part of their cloud security strategy, only 1 in 3 companies surveyed globally are currently using one.

“This research shines a light on organizations who are leading the charge in cloud adoption, prioritizing the security of their data as they roll out new cloud services and winning in the market because of the actions they are taking,” said Craig Nielsen, vice president, APAC, McAfee. “Organizations often tell us how much faster their business moves when security is addressed in the cloud and it is exciting for us now to quantify this experience and share our data and recommendations with the rest of the market.”