EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
The coronavirus pandemic massively accelerated cloud adoption. From Microsoft to small ‘mom-and-pop’ businesses, many enterprises witnessed two years’ worth of digital transformation within the span of two months. Cloud conversions facilitated increased business resilience, greater agility and cutting-edge customer service, among other strategic functions.
Most organizations now rely on multi-cloud solutions. Moreover, in the vast majority of cases, enterprises deploy three or more cloud solutions within computing environments. Here’s what that means…
Shifting business workloads to the cloud means an exponential expansion of server workloads. In turn, this translates to an increase in attackable surface area and new security management needs. While cloud adoption has soared, cloud security continues to feel “wobbly” across industries.
Unmanaged cloud data
The largest percentage of successful attacks on cloud services occur due to customer misconfigurations and poor management. In particular, the extensive quantities of unmanaged SaaS data distributed across enterprises presents significant security threats. This can result in unnecessary internal, external and public acquisition of private data. Now is the time to start evaluating data access internally and externally. Unmanaged data expands the attack surface and increases risk of a data leak.
Cloud email
Cloud email security also represents an outsized challenge for many enterprises. Organizations need to adopt unified solutions to protect remote workforces from malicious files, URLs and phishing across cloud-based email environments. The cloud email threat landscape has never been more extensive. In 2020, every Microsoft Office 365 user in the world experienced at least one attack.
Cloud automation
Many businesses have not yet adopted cloud security automation tools. Cloud automation and machine learning introduce new levels of complexity into cyber security. In turn, this creates more difficulties in relation to management. When you make systems more complicated, you create opportunities for new vulnerabilities. However, with the right tools and security partners, deploying new systems at scale can be simple.
Security hiring
Lack of qualified staff is cited by organizations as among the largest barriers to cloud adoption. As a result, enterprises may face limited data storage prospects. Among organizations that choose to use cloud storage technologies without sufficient staff, existing administrators may encounter cloud-based cyber security challenges. Realigning in relation to cloud can lead to stronger operational outcomes in the long-term.
In Conclusion
The expansion of remote work and remote work collaboration will continue to push large quantities of data to the cloud. As the cloud becomes indispensable, cloud security is also indispensable. Early adopters of comprehensive cloud security gain a competitive edge and can keep attention consistently directed towards core business functionalities rather than security systems.
Invest in a fully integrated and unified cloud security solution. Comprised of network security, application and workload protection, posture management and cloud intelligence, Check Point’s CloudGuard is one of the leading cloud native security solutions for securing assets and workloads. At the core of this solution, CloudGuard Posture Management visualizes and assesses security posture, detects misconfigurations, automates and actively enforces gold standard policies, and protects against attacks and insider threats. In addition, read about Check Point’s new acquisition of cloud security firm Avanan.
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