Cloud use continues to grow rapidly in the enterprise and has unquestionably become a part of mainstream IT – so much so that many organizations now claim to have a “cloud-first” strategy. That’s backed up by a recent Intel Security survey of 1200 respondents which showed that 80% of respondents’ IT spend will go to cloud services within just 16 months. To compete today, businesses need to rapidly adopt and deploy new services, to both scale up or down in response to demand and meet the ever-evolving needs and expectations of employees and customers.
Cloud Concerns
This new found optimism for the cloud inevitably means more critical and sensitive data is put into cloud services. And that means security is going to become a massive issue. Unfortunately, the same survey revealed that the picture isn’t great when it comes to how well organizations are ensuring cloud security today. Some 40% are failing to protect files located on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) with encryption or data loss prevention tools, 43% do not use encryption or anti-malware in their private cloud servers, and 38% use Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) without encryption or anti-malware.
Many organizations have already been at the sharp end of cloud security incidents. Nearly a quarter of respondents (23%) report cloud provider data losses or breaches, and one in five reports unauthorized access to their organizations’ data or services in the cloud. The reality check here is that the most commonly cited cloud security incidents were actually around migrating services or data, high costs, and lack of visibility into the provider’s operations.
Trust in cloud providers and services is growing, but 72% of decision makers in the survey still point to cloud compliance as their greatest concern. That’s not surprising given the current lack of visibility around cloud usage and where cloud data is being stored. The wider trend to move away from the traditional PC-centric environment to unmanaged mobile devices is another factor here.
Hybrid Cloud Security
To securely reap the benefits of cloud while meeting compliance and governance requirements, enterprises will need to take advantage of technologies and tools such as two-factor authentication, data leakage prevention, and encryption, on top of their cloud services and applications.
Increasingly, organizations are also investing in security-as-a-service (SECaaS) and other tools that can help orchestrate security across multiple providers and environments. These help tackle the visibility issue and ensure compliance needs are met. That’s why I believe we are starting to see the rise of so-called “broker” security services. These cloud access security brokers (CASBs) will enable consolidated enterprise security policy enforcement between the cloud service user and the cloud service provider. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2020, 85% of large enterprises will use a CASB for their cloud services, up from fewer than 5% today.
The key to this is for companies to be able to seamlessly push and enforce their own security policies from an on-premise proxy infrastructure to a public infrastructure. For the enterprise, this provides the ability, if required, to encrypt corporate data that sits in a public cloud service and offer complete protection for every endpoint. It means the same security policy is applied to the end users regardless of how or where they have connected, whether that’s through a public or private cloud, from a smartphone in a coffee shop or a Wi-Fi hotspot at the airport.
Cloud adoption in the enterprise is rapidly approaching a tipping point and now more than ever, there is need for a new model of ‘cloud-first’ integrated security that enables the centralized control or orchestration of the myriad of cloud services and apps employees use across the enterprise.
