As a direct response to the market, cloud service providers have sought to address concerns that inhibited widespread mainstream adoption. Companies like Amazon, Salesforce and Xactly -- keen to reassure customers and make their services ubiquitous -- have made huge improvements in transparency, identifying vulnerabilities, offering encryption, automated updates and more stringent authentication, while other vendors are offering cloud data protection gateways, security as a service or allowing business users to bring their own encryption keys.

As a result, cloud security is no longer seen as such a vulnerability and businesses in every sector are now confidently adopting the technology despite the sensitive nature of the information they hold. However, it is important that organizations are cognizant that responsibility for data is not outsourced along with the service; the responsibility remains that of the owner. In this slideshow, Protegrity highlights five trends on cloud security in today's most data-driven organizations.