A new social network company by Sarah Gates called Wisegate, which bills itself as “a private invitation-only community of senior information technology professionals,” has released survey results that suggest security and compliance remain a barrier to cloud adoption for IT across industries.

When asked if they were moving protected class data into the public cloud, 53% of senior IT practitioners from leading companies in financial services, healthcare, consumer products, automotive, and government agencies said that the “cloud was too risky and they have no near term plans” to adopt cloud for such applications. Quite a few members reported that government or industry regulations (such as HIPAA or Sarbanes-Oxley) prevent them from adopting cloud-based applications.

Quite a few? What percentage is that?

A survey brief is available online from Wisegate but it has few of the usual details like sample size. It also shows some inconsistencies with the press release.

When it comes to moving to cloud-based applications and services, Wisegate members are most concerned about security. Scott’s first poll shows that 73% of Wisegate members have security as their biggest reservation about moving to cloud-based applications. A second poll from Scott shows that 53% of Wisegate members are addressing this security concern by requiring data classification, virtualization security, and encryption as a key control for moving to cloud.

Encryption as a key control? Funny. That pun was probably unintentional.

The paper from Wisegate emphasises using information from peers to move into cloud. That’s positive. Yet the news, even without the 73% data point, seems to get the opposite story spin. I’d like to see more detail on the 73% breakdown and how the questions were asked. Virtualization security is not mututally exclusive from data classification and encryption. Maybe the obfuscation of data is a sales tactic to get people to join Wisegate.