A new report from the Ponemon Institute suggests that as many as 82% of companies have already transferred confidential or sensitive data into cloud-based computing services.

While that initial figure could be argued to be encouraging, the ‘Encryption in the Cloud’ report throws up some wider concerns; it is thought that 64 percent of firms hosting their data in the virtual cloud space believe that their hosting provider has the primary responsibility for security.

Potentially even more worrying, around two thirds of companies questioned by Ponemon say that they have no knowledge of what their cloud provider does (or indeed could be doing) to protect their most sensitive and mission critical data on a day-to-day basis.

Other comments on Ponemon’s report have highlighted the finding that 39% of organizations believe that the adoption of cloud technology has decreased their general “security posture” as a company.

These are interesting trends and they come in the same month as Apple Computer inventor Steve Wozniak’s outburst entitled ‘Why The Cloud Sucks’. Wozniak has experienced some lack of synchronization during his personal upgrades using certain cloud-based services.

So is the cloud secure and should we be worried? Cloud industry website Cloud Pro reports with a comment to spell out what we might consider to be the true ‘state of the nation’ with regard to cloud today saying, “The cloud is just a server and data in the cloud is no more or less secure (or indeed robust) than data on a physical machine without appropriate levels of firewall/anti-virus protection, back up and/or replication and data mirroring or redundancy.”

So we do know then that cloud hosting providers segregate and isolate data under ‘absolute’ levels of stringent control; and this is also the case for in multi-tenant cloud environments where multiple customers share space inside the same cloud server.

We also know that is it a fundamental responsibility for every cloud customer to bring their own encryption to bear upon the data that they host in the cloud. Cloud security services are now coming to the fore and reaching maturity as they become accessible, affordable and easy to implement.

Please don’t lose your data in the cloud when you don’t have to.