Only about half of businesses looking to use cloud services have their eye on some of the key potential security issues.

This is a quick follow-up to the last newsletter about an IDG study “As Hyper-Extended Enterprises Grow, So Do Security Risks”, which include cloud services.

Within that survey, IDG asks for the biggest security concerns with cloud computing. Each respondent could check off more than one answer, so the percentages add up to more than 100%. Interestingly, the top concern – lack of transparency for cloud vendor security processes – is a concern for only 51% of respondents. So for roughly half those polled, this was not an issue.

Perhaps some of those who were unconcerned are satisfied with the transparency of their provider, hence no concern. But the question was about cloud computing in general, not about particular providers. Certainly transparency should be on anyone’s checklist of cloud security concerns.

For the next five biggest security issues, an even larger group was unconcerned – somewhere between 53% and 66%, depending on the particular issue.

Is this alarming? Perhaps, but it is more an indication of the level of awareness businesses have about potential cloud security risks. Hopefully any business actually engaged in buying a cloud service would do its homework, become aware of the risks and address them. Over time, the means to address these concerns will become better developed and more standardized as well.

According to the IDG study the top five concerns about cloud security after transparency were, in order: immature technology (47%), protecting data integrity (45%), lack of security standards (40%), risk of non-compliance (40%), and lack of control over access to data (34%).

Tim Greene is senior editor at Network World.