Organizations are accelerating their cloud adoption which has given rise to concerns over cloud cybersecurity. Cloud expansion and scaling across multiple platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure comes with its challenges. It has increased the workload on IT teams as they have to spend more than half of their time investigating security alerts, most of which turn out to be benign.
A research report by Confluera explores how IT leaders detect, evaluate, and act against cybersecurity threats in today’s cloud environment.
Factors raising concerns on cloud cybersecurity
- Cloud expansion and multi-cloud
As per the report by Confluera, nearly 66 percent of IT professionals believe that cloud adoption is the biggest contributor to increasing IT security workload. As the remote and virtual modes of working started gaining momentum, cloud deployment also started expanding in scale and across platforms. As more organizations started opting for multi-cloud deployments to suit their organizational needs, cloud cybersecurity became the main challenge for IT professionals. The report says that 69% of IT professionals identified that consistent security coverage was needed across all cloud infrastructure and that was the biggest barrier to multi-cloud adoption.
Primary obstacles to cloud adoption
Challenges to multi-cloud adoption
- Increased workload affecting security
2021 was a year when organizations saw the latest remote work model as a necessity. According to the survey, 85% of IT professionals experienced an increased workload due to this change. The new work model negatively impacted the cybersecurity readiness of the organization as more than 69% of the IT professionals found it difficult to keep company resources safe and secure. While providing secure company access to remote workers was a major concern, 65% of the IT professionals cited the adoption of cloud services as the top cause of increased workload.
IT security workload contributors
- Too many alerts and false positives
Along with additional responsibilities and increased workloads, investigating all the security alerts, most of which turn out to be false alarms posed great difficulties to ensure the overall security of the organization. The cybersecurity solutions send all kinds of alerts to improve the transparency of which 59% turn out to be false positives. As per the report, IT security professionals spent around 54% of their time only investigating security alerts. 62.5% of IT security professionals have requested cybersecurity solutions that send only real alerts.
- Threat storyboard
A threat storyboard reflects the story of a cyberattack crafted by the IT security professionals after investigating the occurred attack. While many organizations have the tools, resources and knowledge to create threat storyboards, others depend on third parties. 98% of IT security professionals expressed interest in a that automatically creates threat storyboards in real-time. This will save a lot of time and enable them to stop an attack before it occurs.
Cloud cybersecurity readiness
With new tools in the market, 84% of IT professionals felt that their organization is cybersecurity ready for 2022. More than 70% of IT professionals expressed interest in cloud cybersecurity solutions as secure cloud infrastructure is important for the future of the organization. As more organizations are moving to cloud infrastructure, it is also increasing the risks of cyber security. Organizations need to take measures to improve cloud cybersecurity owing to the accelerating cloud adoption and expansion.
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Source and image credits: 2022 Cloud cybersecurity survey report by Confluera
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