Even though they are wary of the implications on security and other business processes, one third of enterprises place highly sensitive data in the public cloud, according to a new study from Symplified.

A press release from Symplified also says that the study – Access Management for the Extended Enterprise: A Timely Challenge, conducted by Forrester – shows that nearly half of the respondents do not think their existing identity and access management (IAM) infrastructures will be able to support cloud applications and provide single sign-on (SSO).

And while most enterprises are concerned about exposing data to the cloud, nearly a third of them already place highly sensitive data like regulated financial (34 percent) and healthcare information (29 percent) in Security as a Service (SaaS) applications. Their top choices for consuming cloud security were embedded in the cloud service (23 percent) and third-party on-premise solution (20 percent).

Other findings include:

• User provisioning (61 percent) and SSO/Web Access Management (53 percent) are the two leading access control priorities for enterprises.
• Fifty-two percent of enterprises are very or somewhat concerned that their attestation and access request processes won’t fit with their cloud IAM solution.
• Fifty-two percent were very or somewhat concerned that their infrastructure is not up to date to support cloud IAM protocols.
• Forty-eight percent were very or somewhat concerned that their organization needs SSO to non-SAML or non-federated SaaS apps.
• Thirty-eight percent were very or somewhat concerned that their existing IAM infrastructure is incompatible with their cloud IAM solution.