Is Your Organization Ready to Secure Your Cloud Operations?
Many organizations are unprepared to handle the risks that cloud services have introduced.
As organizations of all sizes continue to move more and more operations to the cloud, it is critical to be aware of the most common and dangerous cloud security risks and how to stay protected, shares Sundaram Lakshmanan, CTO of SASE products at Lookout.
The benefits of cloud services are clear: they are an efficient and affordable way to scale up business operations and enable your workforce to stay productive from anywhere. But even with all their benefits, many organizations are not prepared to handle the risks that cloud services have introduced.
With your data residing in dozens of cloud apps, and users accessing valuable enterprise resources with endpoints and networks you don’t control, the security environment is now more complex than it has ever been.
It’s no wonder that a recent survey found that only 27% of respondents said they were confident in their ability to address cloud security alerts, and 92% said they needed to enhance their cloud security skills. If those stats alarm you, they should. They indicate that most organizations are vulnerable to cloud security threats.
While the cloud introduces a vast number of risks, I’ve compiled five areas that may pose some of the biggest threats to your organization.
See More: Why Cloud-Forward Companies Need Cross-Cloud Security Solutions
Misconfiguration Can Lead to Data Leakage
While the cloud wields tremendous flexibility, this also creates complicated systems that can result in misconfigurations. And these are no small matters — they were the leading cause of breaches in 2020, with the average breach costing $4.41 million.
Due to the disjointed nature of cloud service deployment, organizations are forced to manage a patchwork of systems with their own policies, capabilities and requirements. Organizations will often deploy specialized products to protect data within these apps as new security gaps come up. But this actually ends up adding more burdens to your IT and security teams as they now need to juggle multiple security products. That’s a balancing act that would be difficult for the most confident security professionals and can leave you with visibility gaps that lead to data leakage and avoidable exposure to your infrastructure.
Existing Access Management Methods Fall Short
With cloud apps come a large number of users, endpoints and networks. To ensure business operations continue securely, you need a way to manage all these identities efficiently.
One method for this is single sign-on (SSO), which helps reduce this complexity by granting users access to apps when they provide the correct step-up authentication. But this is a binary solution, where a user has access if they provide the right password or authentication. Without looking at other factors surrounding the access, such as user behavior or endpoint health, SSO can’t provide any protection for your data. This can be a problem as once a user enters your infrastructure, their actions aren’t monitored.
Similarly, virtual private networks (VPNs) introduce basic protection to on-premises assets but lack any additional monitoring capabilities. Moreover, they provide network-wide access, which means if an account is compromised, the threat actor can easily move laterally and compromise your data.
A Physical Approach to a Digital Age
Organizations are used to deploying standalone appliance-based security tools to protect data and monitor abnormal activities. When all of your user entities resided within the perimeter, this worked fine. But now that you’re operating in the cloud, you have a new set of requirements.
Appliance-based point products aren’t built for the cloud environment. When your data is in various cloud services, and your users connect from anywhere, these traditional tools lose the visibility and control they once had. By nature, they are also deployed as standalone tools, which means they don’t integrate well with each other, creating inefficient workflows that can leave security gaps, even for activities occurring within a corporate network. For example, an on-premises data loss prevention (DLP) tool that discovers data doesn’t always work with a secure web gateway (SWG) to prevent data leakage to the internet.
Lack of Cybersecurity Talent
In addition to the tools deployed, a big challenge for organizations is the shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals, especially as it relates to the cloud. According to a 2020 survey, only 27% of organizations were confident in their ability to address cloud security alerts, and 84% said they needed more staff to close the gap.
As I wrote in the section above, standalone tools create inefficient security operations. With products that don’t work well with each other, there are additional management tasks required, which puts additional strains on your already short-staffed personnel. This introduces room for human error and will likely negatively impact your ability to retain talent.
Emerging Modern Threats
The threat landscape that organizations are faced with right now is a lot different than when everything resided neatly within a corporate perimeter. For example, the internet is now the default network that your users are using. This means employees could easily use unsanctioned apps, whether it’s personal versions of corporate apps like Google Workspace, or other apps that your IT didn’t approve, to handle sensitive corporate data.
In addition to data leaking out via the internet, a new generation of malware, such as ransomware. These threats can easily be distributed by phishing, not just to email inboxes but via countless cloud and mobile apps outside traditional security tools’ monitoring capabilities.
Converge Your Capabilities and Let Automation Take the Lead
Rather than rely on the manual labor of security professionals, organizations need to think about a unified approach to security where data and automation take the lead. When your organization uses a cloud-delivered security platform that consolidates IT and security operations rather than a perimeter-based strategy of purchasing standalone products, you can take some pressure off your security team.
With a centralized view of your organization, you can ensure that misconfigurations are quickly remediated. You can also enforce adaptive policies that go beyond binary yes-no decisions and instead grant granular access to users based on zero-trust principles.
A unified, cloud-delivered platform has rich telemetry into users, endpoints, apps and data. This gives you cloud computing and storage power, ensuring that threats are mitigated and data security is automated. All these features working together ensure that your security team is ready to take on the new risks and challenges they will encounter in the cloud.
How are you adding an extra layer of protection for your cloud operations? Share with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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