Top Four Cloud Security Challenges CISOs Encounter Today

The crunch digital transformation activities have hastened adoption of the cloud for some enterprises, creating unforeseen security risks. Security is the single biggest hurdle that stands in the way of the cloud’s primary benefits, including increased IT flexibility, scalability, and efficiency.

A difficulty that many firms’ CISOs deal with is cloud security. Despite discussions among senior leadership and security departments, it still ranks among the top risks to modern firms. According to the 2021 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, in the first year that cloud incidents outnumbered on-premises ones, 73% of data breaches used cloud assets, up 46% from the previous year.

Here are some challenges with cloud security that every business must deal with.

Cloud security architecture and strategy shortcomings

Too many companies adopt cloud computing without the necessary architecture or plan in place. Customers must be cognizant of the threats they face and how to migrate safely to the cloud before making the switch to the cloud. Firms must keep in mind that the shared responsibility model is not a lift-and-shift approach.

Also Read: How Data Risk Detection and Response Are Becoming Crucial Components of Cloud Security

The customer is responsible for this threat, which is new to the list. Customers will be vulnerable to cyber-attacks without adequate planning, which could result in monetary losses, reputational damage, and legal and compliance problems.

Unprotected APIs

The cloud presents a challenge since attackers have so many potential avenues of entry. The surface attack area is therefore much more dispersed even though it may be smaller overall. This is perhaps nicely exemplified by the growing popularity of serverless operations and micro-service architecture.

Although APIs are excellent, organizations must consider how they affect the overall system. Although the cloud is technically secure, hackers can nevertheless steal data by breaking into less secure APIs. This is a challenge. Firms can protect against vulnerabilities like this by thoroughly vetting each application with the aid of the right cloud security solutions.

Management of identity, credentials, and access

Additionally, access should be distributed based on the job and requirements of the individual because businesses may employ hundreds or thousands of engineers. Simply put, when it comes to access control challenges, enterprises must use the least privilege principles while also establishing methods and policies for secure data removal and disposal.

In order to avoid issues with provisioning and de-provisioning, zombie accounts, excessive admin accounts, and users circumventing Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, it is best for businesses to continuously audit, track, monitor, and manage their cloud credentials.

IAM predominantly causes modern cloud breaches, and IAM risk goes much beyond just individuals and human access to resources. IAM functions as the network in the cloud, allowing cloud resources to communicate with one another.

When designing infrastructure as code, developers need to have a policy as code checks that indicate insecure IAM configurations in order to analyze IAM use in cloud environments, where compliance audits or multiple security technologies may not recognize insecure IAM configurations.

Also Read: CISOs Playbook to Harden Application Programming Interface (APIs) Cyber Security

Failure to adhere to legal requirements

A company must adhere to and comply with a number of regulations. More precisely, these regulations are sector-specific and differ from company to company. Any infringement of the regulations can result in additional fees, fines, condemnations, and other forfeitures, as well as the triggering of penal provisions. The stature of the enterprise suffers as a result in the market.

Therefore, it is crucial to select and confirm the Cloud Service Provider’s (CSP) level of compliance with numerous legislation. As not all cloud service providers have security procedures that satisfy every industry-specific law, a third-party assessment can be performed to confirm if they are in compliance. This examination of the cloud service providers disqualifies them from any risks and issues related to cloud security that might be discovered during corporate audits, the due-diligence procedure, and fines.