Data in cloud is more at risk than enterprises think: Report
Most average enterprises are experiencing above 2,200 misconfiguration incidents in a month on their platform
The Cloud Adoption and Risk Report by McAfee analysed billions of events in anonymised customers production cloud use to assess the current state of cloud deployments and to uncover risks. The report revealed that nearly a quarter of the data in the cloud can be categorised as sensitive, putting an organisation at risk if stolen or leaked. Coupled with the fact that sharing sensitive data in the cloud has increased 53 per cent YoY, those who do not adopt a cloud strategy that includes data loss protection, configuration audits and collaboration controls, will endanger the security of their most valuable asset — data — while exposing themselves to increased risk of noncompliance with internal and external regulations. The study found that while organisations aggressively use the public cloud to create new digital experiences for their customers, the average enterprise experiences more than 2,200 misconfiguration incidents per month in their infrastructure- as -a-service ( IaaS) and platform-as- a- service ( PaaS) instances. Cloud service providers only cover the security of the cloud itself, not customer data or customer use of their infrastructure and platforms. Companies are always responsible for securing their data wherever it is, hence highlighting the need to deploy cloud security solutions that span the whole cloud spectrum, from SaaS to IaaS and PaaS.
“Operating in the cloud has become the new normal for organisations, so much so that our employees do not think twice about storing and sharing sensitive data in the cloud,” said Rajiv Gupta, senior vice president of the Cloud Security Business, McAfee. “Accidental sharing, collaboration errors in SaaS cloud services, configuration errors in IaaS/ PaaS cloud services, and threats are all increasing. In order to continue to accelerate their business, organisations need a cloud- native and frictionless way to consistently protect their data and defend from threats across the spectrum of SaaS, IaaS and PaaS.”
CLOUD COLLAB — BLESSING AND CURSE:
Cloud services bring a momentous opportunity to accelerate business through their ability to quickly scale, allowing businesses to be agile with their resources and provide new opportunities for collaboration. Cloud services like Box and productivity suites like Office 365 are used to increase the fluidity and effectiveness of collaboration. However, collaboration means sharing, and uncontrolled sharing can expose sensitive data.
To secure sensitive data in cloud storage, file sharing and collaboration applications, organisations must first understand which cloud services are in use, hold their sensitive data, and how that data is currently being shared and with whom. Once organisations have gained this visibility, they can then enforce appropriate security policies to prohibit highly sensitive data from being stored in unapproved cloud services and provide guardrails that prevent noncompliant sharing of sensitive data from approved cloud services, such as when data is shared with personal email addresses or through an open, or through public link. IAAS AND THE RISKS OF MISCONFIGURATION:
With SaaS, securing data, user identity and access to data is primarily the customer’s responsibility. With IaaS, customers take on a much larger share of security responsibility that includes data, identity, access, applications, network controls and host infrastructure. While this provides customers with an opportunity to have greater control over their cloud infrastructure, it also increases the organisation’s surface area for security risks and their responsibility for the same. Magnifying the IaaS/ PaaS security challenge is the fact that organisations use multiple IaaS/ PaaS vendors running several instances of each vendor’s product. Our research found:
Ninety- four per cent of IaaS/ PaaS use is AWS, but 78 per cent organisations using IaaS/ PaaS have both AWS and Azure.
Enterprises have an average of 14 misconfigured IaaS/ PaaS instances running at one time, resulting in over 2,200 individual misconfiguration incidents per month.
Five- and- a- half per cent of AWS S3 buckets have world read permissions.
McAfee recommends that organisations continuously audit and monitor their AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform and other IaaS/ PaaS configurations as a standard security practice while protecting data stored in IaaS/ PaaS platforms. IaaS/ PaaS use is growing rapidly as an alternative to on- premises data centres.
INSIDER THREATS AND COMPROMISED ACCTS:
Most of the threats to data in the cloud result from compromised accounts and insider threats. The average organisation generates over 3.2b events per month in the cloud, of which 3,217 are anomalous behaviours. In addition threat events in the cloud, such as a compromised account, privileged user, or insider threat, have increased 27.7 per cent YoY. Eighty per cent of all organisations experience at least one threat per month. Ninety- two per cent have their stolen credentials on the Dark Web.
To get ahead of comprised accounts and insider threats, organisations should understand how cloud services are used. They should also identify anomalous behaviour, which could compromise account threats.
As a first step towards protecting data, cloud access security brokers ( CASB) should be implemented. CASBs are cloud-native services that enforce security, compliance and governance policies. They help leverage and extend their existing security controls where appropriate and define and deploy new cloud- native ones where appropriate to enable enterprises to consistently protect their data and defend from threats.