cloud enterprises
Cloud enterprises- Nearly a quarter of the data in the cloud can be categorized as sensitive, putting an organization at risk if stolen or leaked, reveals the Cloud Adoption and Risk Report released by McAfee. The study analyzed billions of events in anonymized customers production cloud use to assess the current state of cloud deployments and to uncover risks.
Coupled with the fact that sharing sensitive data in the cloud has increased 53 percent YoY, those who do not adopt a cloud strategy that includes data loss protection, configuration audits and collaboration controls, will endanger the security of their most valuable asset—data—while exposing themselves to increased risk of noncompliance with internal and external regulations.
The study found that while organizations aggressively use the public cloud to create new digital experiences for their customers, the average enterprise experiences more than 2,200 misconfiguration incidents per month in their infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) instances.
Cloud service providers only cover the security of the cloud itself, not customer data or customer use of their infrastructure and platforms. Companies are always responsible for securing their data wherever it is, hence highlighting the need to deploy cloud security solutions that span the whole cloud spectrum, from SaaS (software-as-a-service) to IaaS and PaaS.
“Operating in the cloud has become the new normal for organizations, so much so that our employees do not think twice about storing and sharing sensitive data in the cloud,” said Rajiv Gupta, senior vice president of the Cloud Security Business, McAfee. “Accidental sharing, collaboration errors in SaaS cloud services, configuration errors in IaaS/PaaS cloud services, and threats are all increasing. In order to continue to accelerate their business, organizations need a cloud-native and frictionless way to consistently protect their data and defend from threats across the spectrum of SaaS, IaaS and PaaS.”
Cloud Collaboration a Blessing and a Curse
Cloud services bring a momentous opportunity to accelerate business through their ability to quickly scale, allowing businesses to be agile with their resources and provide new opportunities for collaboration.
Cloud services like Box and productivity suites like Office 365 are used to increase the fluidity and effectiveness of collaboration. However, collaboration means sharing, and uncontrolled sharing can expose sensitive data. Findings demonstrate that 22 percent of cloud users share files externally, up 21 percent YoY. Sharing sensitive data with an open, publicly accessible link, has increased by 23 percent YoY. Sensitive data sent to a personal email address also increased by 12 percent YoY
To secure sensitive data in cloud storage, file-sharing and collaboration applications, organizations must first understand which cloud services are in use, hold their sensitive data, and how that data is being shared and with whom. Once organizations have gained this visibility, they can then enforce appropriate security policies to prohibit highly sensitive data from being stored in unapproved cloud services and provide guardrails that prevent noncompliant sharing of sensitive data from approved cloud services, such as when data is shared with personal email addresses or through an open, public link.
IaaS and the Risks of Misconfiguration
With SaaS, securing data, user identity and access to data is primarily the customer’s responsibility. With IaaS, customers take on a much larger share of security responsibility that includes data, identity, access, applications, network controls and host infrastructure. While this provides customers with an opportunity to have greater control over their cloud infrastructure, it also increases the organization’s surface area for security risks and their responsibility for the same.
IaaS providers, like Amazon Web Services (AWS), provide several infrastructure and platform services, each having deep and complicated security settings. Magnifying the IaaS/PaaS security challenge is the fact that organizations use multiple IaaS/PaaS vendors running several instances of each vendor’s product.
The post Data in the cloud is more at risk than enterprises may think, reveals study appeared first on Statii News.
source http://news.statii.co.uk/data-in-the-cloud-is-more-at-risk-than-enterprises-may-think-reveals-study/
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