By 2020, it’s predicted that 83% of company workload will be stored in the cloud (Forbes). This rise in usage and popularity comes at no surprise with how cost-effective and easy it is to manage systems in the cloud.
As more critical applications are migrating towards the cloud, data privacy and software security are becoming a greater concern. With 60% of web applications compromised due to cloud-based email servers (Verizon 2019 DBIR), it’s time to take these concerns seriously.
The cloud has had its share of attacks over the years, from DDoS to data loss attacks and even data breaches. Whether malicious tampering or accidental deleting, these attacks can lead to a loss of sensitive data and often a loss of revenue.
How exactly do we secure data and prevent against these attacks in the cloud?
The one way to truly secure your data in the cloud is through continual monitoring of your cloud systems. However, this is a challenging process for several reasons:
1. Lack of Visibility
Cloud technology solutions often make the job of security providers more difficult because they don’t provide a single-pane-of-glass to view all endpoints and data. For this reason, you need a vast number of tools to monitor your cloud systems. For example, most cloud solutions send email notifications that provide some visibility into your environment. However, these notifications don’t always provide enough insight into what exactly happened. You may receive an email alert about a suspicious login, but many of these alerts don’t give information about where the login attempt happened and what user was affected.
These vague alerts mean you have to investigate further; however, many of these cloud systems don’t have very useful investigative tools. If you want to find out more about the alert, you may be able to view the reports and read the logs associated with the activity, but that requires practice in knowing what to look for and how to interpret the information. This leads to another challenge in cloud security: lack of expertise.
2. Lack of Expertise
It takes practice to be able to look at security logs and interpret what the activity means. Different cloud providers may produce different types of logs and it can be difficult to translate the many varying log types.
If you want to secure your cloud environment properly, you will need a team dedicated to configuring, monitoring and managing these tools. Through 2022, it’s predicted that 95% of cloud security failures will result from customer error (Gartner). This reinforces the need to configure your cloud environment properly. Interpreting logs and configuring cloud systems requires skills that are developed overtime. Many security professionals lack this particular expertise or the time required to properly develop these skills.
Those that do possess these skills and knowledge are in high demand, and there simply aren’t enough people to fill these positions.
3. Lack of Resources
Implementing all the right tools and staffing appropriately to monitor these tools around-the-clock is not an inexpensive endeavor. Luckily, there are services you can leverage to augment your staff and monitor your environment, such as a managed security services provider (MSSP).
MSSPs have the tools and resources to pull information from all of your different cloud systems and monitor them in one place. With a full staff of experts on-hand at all hours, an MSSP is fully prepared to monitor and respond to incidents. They can help provide the expertise and visibility into your cloud environment required to properly secure your cloud systems.
