In its latest Global Information Security Survey which surveyed 1,700 companies including 165 in Australia, 76 per cent of respondents said there was an increasing level of risk due to external threats.

However, only 42 per cent of the firms surveyed had updated their information security strategy in the past year.

Ernst & Young Australia information security leader, Mike Trovato, said in a statement that this posed a risk as 69 per cent of Australian companies surveyed were using or considering the use of Cloud computing services within the next 12 months.

"Despite increasing Cloud adoption, many organisations in Australia are still unclear of the security implications of Cloud and are slow to adopt [strategies] therefore falling behind their global counterparts," Trovato said.

"What we are seeing are organisations either moving to the Cloud prematurely and without appropriately considering the associated risk, or avoiding it altogether," he said.