Welcome to “Cloudy Wednesday”. Each Wednesday, Evolving Solutions will focus on the latest news and information on cloud computing.

George V. Hulme’s article “Clouds of Anxiety: Companies Worry About Security of Cloud Computing” on ComputerWorld highlights some interesting findings from several surveys about cloud security.

A Forrester ForrSight survey shows that 67 percent of large enterprises are using cloud computing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms to support production applications. That’s greater than the 61 percent saying they use IaaS for testing and development. This shows that companies aren’t just using cloud for simple tasks, but for crucial production systems.

The Ponemon Institute research firm found that 27% of the companies rated their management of cloud server security as fair and 25% as poor. A shocking 42% said if they wouldn’t know if any of their company’s applications or data was compromised in the cloud.

In a study by Dome9 Security, 61% of respondents say their organization doesn’t have a firewall management product for their cloud storage. Of those who don’t, 62% say it’s because they aren’t scalable, cost too much (59%) and aren’t available (57%)

The Dome9 results are mirrored by another recent Ponemon study that found less than 50% of organizations have the necessary technologies to secure their cloud deployments.