According to Firewalls and the Cloud survey, more than 80% of organisations are concerned about deploying traditional firewalls in the cloud.

Nearly 40% of respondents said they are concerned about inappropriate pricing and licensing for the cloud, while 34% said they are worried about the lack of integration preventing cloud automation.

Despite this, almost all survey respondents see value in cloud-specific firewalls, with 74% of respondents saying integration with cloud management, monitoring and automation capabilities is the most beneficial cloud-specific firewall capability.

Automation capabilities

The survey also studied how security automation benefits DevOps teams. 56% of organisations surveyed have adopted DevOps, DevSecOps, or CI/CD development methodologies (continuous integration and continuous deployment).

Of the above, 93% faced challenges integrating security into those practices, while 67% reported existing security solutions was the top challenge.

Tim Jefferson, VP public cloud at Barracuda, commented: “We’re continuing to see questions and concerns around how organisations should approach security with their cloud deployments, especially from larger companies.

Security tools

“While there are a number of reasons for this, moving to the cloud requires a new way of thinking about security for organisations that are used to operating under traditional data centre architecture.

“Using security tools specifically designed for the public cloud can actually make a business more secure than they were when they operated purely on-premise.”

The Firewalls and the Cloud survey was conducted by more than 600 IT security professionals and created by Dimensional Research.

Written from press release by Leah Alger