A survey has shown that organisations are increasingly storing confidential and sensitive data on the cloud, with nearly half of CIOs polled, admitting that they carried out the practice.

The survey "Encryption in the Cloud” by Ponemon Institute surveyed 4,000 IT professionals around the globe.

While 35 percent of IT professionals said that there organisations carried out encryption of sensitive data before uploading to the cloud, however only 11 percent of cloud providers offered encryption as service.

Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, said “two-thirds of those that move sensitive data to the Cloud regard their service providers as being primarily responsible for protecting that data, even though a similar number have little or no knowledge about what measures their providers have put in place to protect data.”