As businesses of all sizes continue to shift their operations to the cloud, it is crucial to be aware of the most dangerous and critical security threats and how to safeguard themselves.
The advantages of cloud services are obvious: they enable the workforce to remain productive from anywhere and are an effective and economical approach to scaling up business operations. However, despite all of its advantages, many businesses are not equipped to deal with the threats that cloud services have presented.
The security environment is increasingly complex due to data being stored in several cloud apps and users accessing critical organizational resources through endpoints and networks that enterprises do not control.
While there are many risks associated with using the cloud, here are a few areas that pose some of the biggest threats to an enterprise.
Misconfiguration Can Result in Data Leakage
Although the cloud offers great flexibility, it also produces complex systems that can lead to misconfigurations.
Organizations are compelled to manage various systems with their own capabilities, policies, and requirements due to the fragmented nature of cloud service deployment. As new security gaps appear, businesses often use specialized tools to protect the data contained in these apps. But because the IT security teams now have to handle different security technologies, this really makes their jobs harder. Even the most confident security professionals would find it challenging to strike that balance, which might result in visibility gaps for companies exposing their infrastructure to unnecessary risk and data loss.
Managing Identities Efficiently
There are a lot of users, networks, and endpoints associated with cloud apps. Businesses require a method to effectively manage all of these identities to maintain the security of their operations.
Also Read: Demonstrating the Value of IT Security as Budgets Begin to Tighten
Single sign-on (SSO) is one approach that lessens complexity by allowing users access to apps when they provide the appropriate step-up authentication. However, this is a binary solution; people only have access if they enter the correct authentication information or a password. SSO cannot safeguard the data without considering other aspects of the access, such as endpoint health and user behavior. This could be a problem because user behaviours aren’t monitored once they enter the infrastructure.
The Digital Age
Organizations often utilize standalone appliance-based security technologies to safeguard data and track unusual activity. This worked as long as every user entity was located inside the perimeter. However, given that they are now operating in the cloud, organizations have a new set of requirements.
Appliance-based point solutions weren’t designed for the cloud. These legacy tools no longer have the visibility and control they previously did when data is spread across multiple services, and users can join from anywhere. Because they are standalone solutions by design, they don’t integrate well with one another and can lead to ineffective workflows that can result in security vulnerabilities, even for operations carried out within a corporate network.
Talent Gap in Cybersecurity
A significant challenge for enterprises is the lack of qualified cloud cybersecurity experts, and this skill gap can be a big hurdle.
Products that don’t complement one another demand additional management duties, which adds to the workload of the already understaffed team. This creates room for human error and is likely to have a detrimental effect on a company’s ability to retain talent.
The Need for Automation
Organizations should consider a unified strategy for security that prioritizes data and automation over manual labor. A business can relieve some of the load on their security team by switching from a perimeter-based strategy of buying isolated products to a cloud-delivered security platform that unifies IT security operations.
Also Read: How SOC Automation Solutions Can Address Complexity and Boost Performance
Businesses can ensure that configuration errors are swiftly fixed by using a centralized view. Additionally, they can enforce flexible policies that provide users with more granular access based on zero-trust principles rather than making binary yes/no decisions.
Rich telemetry into endpoints, apps, users, and data is available from a unified, cloud-delivered platform. This increases the compute and storage capacity, reducing risks and automating data security. Together, these features ensure that the security team is prepared to handle the additional challenges and risks that the cloud will present.
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