Cloud services can help businesses store and back up data more effectively, but the technology's security is still much debate among IT professionals. In a recent Ponemon Institute study of 1,000 IT security practitioners and compliance officers, the two groups disagreed on the cloud's security capabilities and what steps should be taken to improve them.

The survey respondents clashed on the topic of the cloud's infrastructure. Only one-third of security practitioners, compared to half of compliance officers, believe that IaaS is as secure as on-premise data centers.

Regarding how to improve the security, the majority of IT practitioners said that encryption should be used. Compliance officers agreed that encryption is important, but they said it should mainly be used to keep unauthorized employees from accessing data that isn't necessary to perform their duties, the study found.

Nonetheless, both groups believe that security in the cloud is extremely important and should not be the responsibility of one individual.

As high-profile data breaches continue to make headlines, businesses are realizing the importance of security, especially in the cloud. This may be one reason revenues of cloud security applications will continue to grow, eventually reaching $1.5 billion by 2015, according to Forrester Research.