As many as 81% of organisations have experienced a cloud-related security incident over the last 12 months, with almost half (45%) suffering at least four incidents.
This is according to a study by Venafi, a provider of machine identity management, which has evaluated the complexity of cloud environments and its impact on cybersecurity.
The underlying issue for these security incidents is the dramatic increase in security and operational complexity connected with cloud deployments. And, since the organizations in this study currently host two fifths (41%) of their applications in the cloud but expect increase to 57% over the next 18 months, this complexity will continue to increase.
More than half (51%) of the security decision makers (SDMs) in the study believe security risks are higher in the cloud than on premises, citing several issues that contribute to those risks. The most common cloud-related security incidents respondents have experienced are:
Security incidents during runtime (34%)
Unauthorized access (33%)
Misconfigurations (32%)
Major vulnerabilities that have not been remediated (24%)
A failed audit (19%)
The key operational and security concerns that SDMs have in relation to moving to the cloud are:
Hijacking of accounts, services or traffic (35%)
Malware or ransomware (31%)
Privacy/data access issues, such as those from GDPR (31%)
Unauthorized access (28%)
Nation state attacks (26%)
Kevin Bocek, VP of security strategy and threat intelligence at Venafi, said: “Attackers are now on board with business’ shift to cloud computing.
“The ripest target of attack in the cloud is identity management, especially machine identities. Each of these cloud services, containers, Kubernetes clusters and microservices needs an authenticated machine identity – such as a TLS certificate – to communicate securely. If any of these identities is compromised or misconfigured, it dramatically increases security and operational risks.”
The study also investigated how responsibility for securing cloud-based applications is currently assigned across internal teams. This varies widely across organizations, with enterprise security teams (25%) the most likely to manage app security in the cloud, followed by operations teams responsible for cloud infrastructure (23%), a collaborative effort shared between multiple teams (22%), developers writing cloud applications (16%) and DevSecOps teams (10%). However, the number of security incidents indicates that none of these models are effective at reducing security incidents.
When asked who should be responsible for security cloud-based applications, again, there was no clear consensus. The most popular option shares responsibility between cloud infrastructure operations teams and enterprise security teams (24%). The next most popular options are share responsibility across multiple teams (22%), leaves responsibility with developers writing cloud applications (16%) and DevSecOps teams (14%).
Read more: cloudcomputing-news.net
