Today, most employees access public cloud solutions by bypassing IT. This is concerning for CIOs/CEOs given that it puts their organizations at substantial risk for data security and compliance challenges.

But, what if it isn't actually the public cloud that you need to worry about? What if it'syour own internal processesthat are the biggest risk when using cloud?

Recently, Gartner released their top predictions for IT organizations and users for 2016. According to their report, Gartner predicts, "Through 2020, 95 percent of cloud security failures will be the customer's fault."

Let's think about this for a moment. For years, companies have claimed they avoided public cloud solutions due to security concerns. This included multi-tenancy/shared resources (noisy neighbors), authentication/access control, availability needs, and meeting compliance requirements. Yet, it's not necessarily public cloud providers who need to be companies' top concern- rather, it's their own internal procedures that lead to compliance failures and increased levels of business risk

Organizations need to look at external factorsas well as their internal processesto reduce risks from and gain the benefits of using public cloud.

As Gartner states in their prediction, "The characteristics of the parts of the cloud stack under customer control can make cloud computing a highly efficient way for naive users to leverage poor practices, which can easily result in widespread security or compliance failures".

Therefore, it is increasingly important for businesses to develop a holistic cloud management approach to properly address risk.

Cisco Cloud Consumption as a Service helps organizations begin their journey to managing cloud by identifying cloud usage throughout the business for complete visibility. With this visibility you can begin to evolve your cloud management capabilities, including:

• Meet compliance and properly mitigate risks by defining cloud usage policies while working with your DLP (data loss prevention) solutions
• Reduce cloud spend by identifying redundant services
• Identify and meet the cloud needs of internal groups
• Benchmark cloud use against peers
• Compare providers to find the right cloud services to meet your needs

Establish Cloud Management To Avoid Unnecessary Risk

To learn more about how you can mitigate risks by using our cloud management tools, register for our webinar,Reducing Risk of Shadow IT,on November 12^that 10am PT to understand how Cisco Cloud Consumption as a Service can help keep your business secure while still leveraging strategic cloud services. Register here.

Can't attend? Learn more about how our software can help you better manage public cloud services by signing up for a free trial of Cloud Consumption as a Service at www.cisco.com/go/cloudconsumptionfreetrial

As always, feel free to chat with me on Twitter for questions and comments.