Posted by Mumbai: Organizations up the risk with over-reliance on cloud vendors for security, as per a survey.
According to CyberArk‘s new survey, as global organizations increasingly move critical applications, regulated customer data and development work into public cloud environments.
36% of Organizations say the number one benefit for moving workloads to the cloud is to offload security risk. This is despite many public cloud providers providing straightforward guidance on their shared responsibility models for security and compliance in cloud environments.
The results are part of the newly-released CyberArk Global Advanced Threat Landscape Report 2019: Focus on Cloud.
“The risks caused by a lack of clarity about who is responsible for security in the cloud is compounded by an overall failure by organizations to secure privileged access in these environments,” said Adam Bosnian, EVP – Global Business Development, CyberArk.
“Despite the often sensitive and highly regulated data being stored in the cloud, it was surprising to see that less than half of organizations don’t have a strategy in place for securing privileges in the cloud, a finding that remains unchanged since our last report,” added Bosnian.
As organizations utilize the cloud to accelerate digital transformation, there must be greater awareness of where potential security risks exist:
49 percent of respondents migrate business-critical applications (i.e., ERP, CRM or financial management) into the public cloud 45 percent store customer data subject to regulatory oversight in the public cloud.
39 percent use the public cloud for internal development, including DevOps 75 percent rely on the cloud provider’s built-in security, despite half (50 percent) of this number recognizing cloud providers’ built-in security is not sufficient
Privileged Access is the Greatest Cloud Security Concern
According to the survey, the greatest security concerns in public cloud usage are:
Insiders, partners and contractors with privileged access (46 percent) Unauthorized access to cloud management consoles (46 percent) Shared credentials across compute, storage or application instances (44 percent)
The problem becomes critical when unsecured and unmanaged credentials provide privileged access, which can enable attackers to escalate privileges and gain elevated access within cloud infrastructure.
According to the survey, a high percentage of organizations up their security risks and unaware of it.
A majority of organizations (62 percent) are unaware that credentials, secrets and privileged accounts exist in IaaS and PaaS environments. Only 49 percent currently have a privileged access security strategy in place for cloud infrastructure and workloads
The findings are part of an early look at the CyberArk Global Advanced Threat Landscape Report 2019.