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The cloud industry is growing at an unprecedented rate with no signs of slowing down in the foreseeable future. Recent surveys have forecasted a 17% year-over-year revenue growth of public cloud services-an indication of how rapidly managed cloud services are getting mainstreamed.
But as organisations are shifting their workloads to the cloud, the risk of breaches has become real. With the threat of security attacks looming large, these organisations have become more susceptible to breaches than ever before.
No, wonder the cloud security market is burgeoning and is expected to reach 8.9 billion by 2020.
As a business, you need to be aware of the security trends prevalent in the cloud industry. This will help you choose the right cloud security solutions and prepare better for the lurking threats.
So, let’s discuss them one by one.
Insiders pose a higher risk to organisations than outside attackers for the simple reason that they are already inside the organisation and don’t have to breach any security barriers. Their mere presence on the premises does not raise any red flags.
As per a recent survey, around 68% of the IT professionals consider their organizations to be moderately to extremely vulnerable to insider threats.
Notwithstanding the growth in technology in recent years, most of the organizations still scramble to gain visibility into user activity within their premises.
Businesses are realizing that unauthorized activities of users that have access to their data and systems pose a greater threat than sophisticated attacks from malicious hackers outside. This is because theft or misuse of data by employees may take months or even years to get discovered.
The growing threat of insider attacks will make companies focus more on employee activities -which systems and accounts they have access to, what do they do with their systems and how to restrict access to systems and data in order to minimize insider risks.
Cloud security experts are turning to technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning for building robust cloud security solutions. While AI-ML technologies cannot be considered a magic bullet for security attacks, they can mitigate the risk to a significant extent.
Machine learning algorithms are fed with swathes of organizational data to make them recognize patterns and understand what’s normal and what isn’t. Any deviation from the normal pattern is considered a threat. Organizations are notified of this threat immediately so that they can take appropriate action if required.
For instance, a machine learning model is fed with data pertaining to employee logging activity such as from where and when employees log into their systems, what they normally access and so on. Any aberration from these norms (e.g. logging in during midnight or from a remote system) would get flagged so that a threat, if any, would be dealt with on time to avoid large-scale damage.
As technology continues to advance, more and more organizations will leverage sophisticated threat detection algorithms to augment their cloud security solutions.
As automated deployment of services continues to grow, the demand for managed container services will surge in the years to come. Technology providers will continue to shift from conventional development practices to serverless architectures. This will help reduce operational costs to a great degree.
As a result of these developments, we are likely to see a rise in demand for specialized developers and DevOps-aware security practices. Companies will increasingly adopt DevSecOps in a bid to bolster their security and achieve higher flexibility and scalability.
DevSecOps will also help them bring in robust governance measures and minimize the possibility of a cyberattack. They will take steps to intertwine cloud security solutions into their processes from the very beginning.
There’s no denying that organizations that are shifting to the cloud are at an advantageous position than their counterparts who are still stuck with on premise servers. That’s because cloud hosting providers including the likes of AWS, Azure and Google Cloud update their infrastructure regularly to provide the first line of defense.
Having said that, the cloud also remains susceptible to a wide range of security threats-insecure APIs, misconfigured systems, distributed denial of service, IoT containers, remote logging and compromised credentials.
As a matter of fact, around 23% of the organizations have hosts that lack critical patches in the cloud. To overcome these vulnerabilities, organizations are required to use automotive tools to carry out vulnerability assessments and fix critical patches as needed.
Organizations availing public cloud storage services constantly face the risk of a breach. Compliances and regulations are a way of ensuring the safety and security of their data. GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOX and ITAR are some compliance regulations they need to adhere to.
While these compliances do not guarantee a fully secure environment, it’s difficult to stay protected without them. Organizations are beginning to understand the importance of these regulations; many of them are taking measures in this direction. But they still need to go a long way before they have achieved comprehensive compliance and governance across the public cloud.
So, these are some cloud security trends that are likely to dominate the cloud space in the coming years. Can you think of any other trend which didn’t find mention in our post? Let us know in the comment section below. Thanks for reading.
