All of the cloud’s major promises — increased IT efficiency, flexibility, and scalability — come with one major challenge: security.
Many organizations are unable to distinguish between the responsibilities of the cloud service provider (CSP) and their own, exposing them to numerous vulnerabilities. The expanded expanse of the cloud also expands an organization’s potential attack surface. To make matters worse, traditional security controls frequently fail to meet cloud security requirements.
Breach of data
Data breaches, which are the responsibility of both CSPs and their customers, remained the top cloud security threat in CSA’s report this year. Over the years, the cloud has been blamed for a number of data breaches, the most notable being Capital One’s cloud misconfigurations.
A data breach can bring a company to its knees, causing irreversible reputational damage, financial difficulties due to regulatory implications, legal liabilities, incident response costs, and decreased market value.
Account Hacking
The disclosure, accidental leakage, exposure, or other compromises of a cloud account that is critical to the operation, administration, or maintenance of a cloud environment is referred to as cloud account hijacking. These highly privileged and sensitive accounts, if compromised, can have far-reaching consequences.
Account compromise can result in data breaches and service disruptions due to phishing and credential stuffing, as well as weak or stolen credentials and improper coding.
Misconfigurations and ineffective change management
When assets are incorrectly configured, they are vulnerable to attack. Excessive permissions and the use of default credentials are two other major sources of vulnerabilities, in addition to insecure storage.
In addition, ineffective change control can result in cloud misconfigurations. Change control should be automated in on-demand, real-time cloud environments to support rapid change.
Cloud security architecture and strategy are lacking
Too many businesses rush into the cloud without having the proper architecture and strategy in place. Customers must understand the threats they face before moving to the cloud, how to migrate to the cloud securely (it is not a lift-and-shift process) and the ins and outs of the shared responsibility model.
This threat is new to the list and is the customer’s responsibility. Customers will be vulnerable to cyber attacks if proper planning is not implemented, which can result in financial losses, reputational damage, and legal and compliance issues.
Inadequate management of identity, credentials, access, and keys
The majority of cloud security threats – and all cybersecurity threats – can be traced back to identity and access management (IAM) issues.
Standard IAM challenges are exacerbated by cloud use, according to a new addition to the top cloud security challenges list. Inventorying, tracking, monitoring, and managing the massive number of cloud accounts required is complicated by issues with provisioning and de-provisioning, zombie accounts, excessive admin accounts, and users evading IAM controls, as well as difficulties defining roles and privileges.
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