New Delhi, Jul 3 (IANS): Nearly half (46 per cent) of Indian IT and security professionals reported that all corporate data stored in the Cloud is sensitive, a new report said on Wednesday.

According to the IT company Thales, Cloud security spending has now topped all other security spending categories.

About 37 per cent of organisations have experienced a Cloud data breach in India, with 14 per cent having had one in the past year.

"The scalability and flexibility that the Cloud offers are highly compelling for organisations, so it’s no surprise it is central to their security strategies," said Ashish Saraf, VP and Country Director, Thales in India.

"With India continuously progressing in the field of digital technology and data sovereignty and privacy emerging as top concerns in this year’s research, it is vital to solve these challenges of Cloud security now to ensure a secured and trusted future for all," he added.

The report surveyed nearly 3,000 IT and security professionals across 18 countries in 37 industries.

Moreover, the report said that Cloud resources have become the biggest targets for cyberattacks, with Cloud storage (30 per cent), SaaS applications (30 per cent), and Cloud management infrastructure (28 per cent) cited as the leading categories of attack in India.

Human error and misconfiguration continued to be the top root cause for data breaches (34 per cent), followed by exploiting previously unknown vulnerabilities (32 per cent), exploiting known vulnerabilities (21 per cent) and failure to use Multi-Factor Authentication (11 per cent).