Vital Necessity Of Cloud Computing Highlights Security Risks
The vital necessity of cloud computing for both business and the general population is likely to accelerate market growth. With the frequency of online breaches and technological attacks on the rise, security maintenance has become the key point of focus.
Companies have to take vital precautions before the onset of cyber risk.
A newly released report by the leading cloud security specialist Orca Security on the State of Cloud Security In 2020 says that almost 80 percent of organisations have at least one neglected, Internet-facing workload, meaning it’s running on an unsupported operating system or has remained unpatched and insecure for 180 days or more.
When an organisation elects to store data or host applications on the public cloud, it loses its ability to have physical access to the servers hosting its information. As a result, potentially sensitive data is at risk from insider attacks. Insider attacks are the sixth biggest threat in cloud computing.
The recent statistics explain that there exist some organisations that have employed cloud-based security solutions. Around 90% of companies are deploying cloud-based services.
Only 12% of global IT sectors understand how General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will affect the cloud services. 66% of IT engineers say that security was the biggest concern when they adopted the cloud computing platform.
The Orca Security Report explains that:
- Attackers look for vulnerable frontline workloads to gain entrance to cloud accounts and expand laterally within the environment. While security teams need to secure all public cloud assets, attackers only need to find one weak link.
- Weak security authentication is another way that attackers breach public cloud environments. The Orca Security study found that authentication and password storage issues are commonplace.
- Almost 25% of organisations aren’t using multi-factor authentication to protect one of their cloud account’s root, super admin users.
- Almost half of organisations have internet-facing workloads containing secrets and credentials, posing a risk of lateral movement.
- 60 percent of organisations have at least one neglected Internet-facing workload that has reached its end of life and is no longer supported by manufacturer security updates. Once past the Internet-facing workload and with keys-in-hand, cyber criminals traverse less secure internal machines in search of crown jewel data.
- 77 percent of organisations have 10 percent or more of their internal workloads unpatched either for longer than 180 days or are no longer supported.
Hackers take advantage of knowing that internal servers are less protected than external Internet-facing servers and that they can expand rapidly in search of critical data once inside a cloud estate and so cloud security is something all organisations must review and check systematically.
You Might Also Read:
The Future Of Ransomware Is In The Cloud:
