A day after one of the biggest security breaches in Israel's secure internet, Tel Aviv-based Dome9, which helps companies secure their cloud servers, released what is says is the first comprehensive study of security on the cloud – and the results are anything but reassuring for folks whose financial, personal, medical, and other information is stored on remote servers. According to the study, 67% of security experts said that the servers that their clients and companies use to store and access information aren't safe. But even worse, 54% of these experts don't feel that the people responsible for security – among them some of the biggest in the U.S. - know enough about firewalls to keep information safe!

The study was conducted for Dome9 by Ponemon Institute, a well-known research center dedicated to network privacy, data protection and information security policy. Nearly 700 top security experts were interviewed for the study – nearly half of them responsible for security at multinationals with over 5,000 employees. And study participants have at least, on average, over a decade of experience in security. In other words, we are talking about the internet's security braintrust.

And many of them fear that what happened over the weekend in Israel – when a Saudi hacker stole 15,000 names, credit card numbers, and passwords of Israeli credit card customers – could happen on their server as well. The ugly truth is that many of the “experts,” by their own testimony (as reported in the study) don't know how to fully control the opening and closing of ports to the internet. Open ports allow users to access the server, but they can easily be compromised and hijacked for nefarious purposes.

Dome9's business is to ensure that that doesn't happen. Dome9's system allows administrators to keep all administrative ports on servers to remain closed without losing access and control, dynamically opening and closing them when necessary. The system can open ports for just specific users who have been invited to access a server, and closes ports automatically, so there is no need to manually reconfigure your firewall. It's an automatic, hassle-free approach to cloud security. As Zohar Alon, Co-Founder and CEO of Dome9, says, “You wouldn’t leave your car unlocked in a public parking lot…don’t leave your server unlocked.”