CLOUD RESOURCES HAVE BECOME BIGGEST TARGETS FOR CYBERATTACKS, FINDS THALES
As the use of the cloud continues to be
strategically vital to many organizations, cloud resources have become the
biggest targets for cyber-attacks, with SaaS applications (31%), Cloud Storage
(30%) and Cloud Management Infrastructure (26%) cited as the leading categories
of attack. As a result, protecting cloud environments has risen as the top security
priority ahead of all other security disciplines.
This comes as organizations continue to experience
cloud data breaches. Forty-four percent of organizations have experienced a
cloud data breach with 14% reported having an incident in the last 12 months.
Human error and misconfiguration continued to lead the top root cause of these
breaches (31%), followed by exploiting known vulnerabilities (28%), and failure
to use Multi-Factor Authentication (17%).
Growing cloud usage across enterprises has seen an
accompanying growth in the potential attack surface for threat actors, with 66%
of organizations using more than 25 SaaS applications and nearly half (47%) of
corporate data being sensitive. Despite the increased risks to sensitive data
in the cloud, the data encryption rates remain low, with less than 10% of
enterprises encrypting 80% or more of their sensitive cloud data.
Sebastien
Cano, Senior Vice President for Cloud Protection and Licensing activities at
Thales: “The scalability and flexibility that the cloud offers is highly
compelling for organizations, so it’s no surprise it is central to their
security strategies. However, as the cloud attack surface expands,
organizations must get a firm grasp on the data they have stored in the cloud,
the keys they’re using to encrypt it, and the ability to have complete
visibility into who is accessing the data and how it being used. It is vital to
solve these challenges now, especially as data sovereignty and privacy have
emerged as top concerns in this year’s research.”
As organizations gain more experience in using
cloud computing, many have modernized their investments to meet new security
challenges. For organizations that prioritized digital sovereignty as an
emerging security concern, refactoring applications to logically separate,
secure, store, and process cloud data was the top way they would attain or
achieve sovereignty initiatives ahead of other measures such as repatriating
workloads back to on-premises or in-territory. Future-proofing cloud environments
(31%) was the number one driver behind digital sovereignty initiatives, while
adhering to regulations came in at a distant second at 22%.
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