As The Cloud’s Popularity Grows, So Does The Risk To Sensitive Data

A new survey – part of the Ponemon Institute “2018 Global Cloud Data Security Study” – showed that despite the increasing adoption of cloud services worldwide, there is a wide gap in the level of security precautions applied by companies in different markets.

The survey found that organizations in the UK (35%), Brazil (34%) and Japan (31%) are less cautious than those in Germany (61%) when sharing sensitive and confidential information stored in the cloud with third parties. Jason Garbis, VP at Cyxtera commented below.

Jason Garbis, VP at Cyxtera:

“Organisations are taking advantage of the cloud for its scalability, flexibility and operational efficiencies. Yet most are challenged to secure cloud-based data and applications for several reasons. Clouds are typically very dynamic, with an ever-changing set of servers being continually created and destroyed. This makes it much harder to manage from a security perspective. Each cloud infrastructure takes a slightly different approach to user access policy and configuration, leaving security teams to manage disparate security models. Finally, most cloud providers still follow a traditional all-or-nothing network access model limited to source and destination IP address controls. This inevitably leads to over-privileged access, which introduces a significant security gap. Adversaries are well aware of this gap and use it to gain a foothold.

“Since traditional security tools are ineffective in cloud environments, organisations need to turn to more sophisticated ways to secure data and applications – like those applied in a software-defined perimeter (SDP) approach. Solutions like AppGate SDP create a segment of one between the users and authorized network resources. Each user’s network access entitlements are dynamically altered based on identity, device, network, and application sensitivity, driven by easily configured policies. With this approach, the attack surface area is dramatically reduced and cloud-based data and applications are significantly more secure.”