A recent survey of 250 senior IT decision makers in the U.K. found that, although 84 percent claimed they were concerned or very concerned about IT security breaches, 55 percent have not tested the security systems and procedures of cloud vendors. The study, conducted by IT recruitment consultancy Robert Half Technology, also found that 11 percent of CIOs are not taking any proactive action to address cybersecurity.

Researchers noted that a Cloud Industry Forum survey of U.K. IT executives found that 61 percent of organizations are now using a cloud-based service, raising the stakes of a potential disregard for data security. Ryan Rubin, U.K. director of risk consultancy Protiviti, a subsidiary of Robert Half, explained that organizations should anticipate any issues that might arise when choosing to outsource IT processes.

"Since an increasingly higher percentage of IT security breaches involve third parties, gaining assurance from cloud providers is critical to managing information security risk," Rubin said. "Whilst companies may migrate IT towards cloud providers in an attempt to reduce costs, they cannot outsource their information security risks."

According to Computing.co.uk, 77 percent of firms concerned about moving to the cloud cite data security as an issue. Additionally, that study found that 23 percent of organizations using a cloud vendor had to ask that provider to create a stronger protective environment and that 10 percent were surprised by how easy it was to gain access to their information.

Organizations that are serious about protecting sensitive data in the cloud may want to consider strengthening protection on a file level. By implementing data encryption software, firms can ensure data integrity in the cloud even if the security measures taken by their vendor have not been fully audited.