Public cloud security continues to be a major challenge for enterprise security teams.
This is among the findings from Check Point Software Technologies’ global 2020 Cloud Security Report, highlighting the challenges faced by enterprise security teams in protecting data and workloads in their public cloud deployments.
A massive 75% of respondents stated they were ‘very concerned’ or ‘extremely concerned’ about security in the public cloud.
The challenge is made more complex as 68% said their organisations use two or more different public cloud providers, which means that security teams often have to use multiple native security tools and management consoles to try and enforce security and compliance across the different environments.
Key findings of the 2020 Cloud Security Report include:
* The top four public cloud security threats: the leading threats cited by respondents was misconfiguration of the cloud platform (68%), up from third in 2019’s survey. This was followed by unauthorized cloud access (58%), insecure interfaces (52%), and hijacking of accounts (50%).
* The main security barriers to cloud adoption: respondents named a lack of qualified staff (55%) as the biggest barrier to adoption – up from fifth place in last year’s survey. Forty-six percent cited budget constraints, 37% data privacy issues, and 36% a lack of integration with on-premises security.
* Existing security tools struggle with public clouds: 82% said their traditional security solutions either don’t work at all, or only provide limited functions in cloud environments, up from 66% in 2019 – highlighting an increase in cloud security issues over the past 12 months.
* Public cloud is riskier: 52% of respondents considered the risk of security breaches in public clouds higher than in traditional, on-premises IT environments. Just 17% see lower risks, and 30% believe the risks are about the same between the two environments.
* Cloud security budgets to rise: 59% of organizations expect their cloud security budget to increase over the next 12 months. On average, organisations allocate 27% of their security budget to cloud security.
“The report shows that organisations’ cloud migrations and deployments are racing ahead of their security teams’ abilities to defend them against attacks and breaches. Their existing security solutions only provide limited protections against cloud threats, and teams often lack the expertise needed to improve security and compliance processes,” says TJ Gonen, head of cloud product line at Check Point Software.
“To close these security gaps, enterprises need to get holistic visibility across all of their public cloud environments, and deploy unified, automated cloud-native protections, compliance enforcement and event analysis. This way, they can keep pace with the needs of the business while ensuring continuous security and compliance.”