In today’s digital world, the pull of the cloud and its benefits of flexibility, speed, innovation, cost, and scalability are now too great to be dismissed by the usual fears, according to Rolf Haas, enterprise technology specialist at Intel Security
Cloud use continues to grow rapidly in the enterprise and has become a part of mainstream IT, so much so that many organisations now claim to have a ‘cloud-first’ strategy.
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.
This is backed up by a recent Intel Security survey of 1,200 respondents which showed that 80 per cent of respondents’ IT spend will go to cloud services within just 16 months. Even if that outlook overestimates cloud spend, it still shows a dramatic shift in mindset, and it is often the business, rather than the IT department, that is driving the shift.
Cloud Concerns
This newfound 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 organisations are ensuring cloud security today. Some 40 per cent are failing to protect files located on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) with encryption or data loss prevention tools, 43 per cent do not use encryption or anti-malware in their private cloud servers, and 38 per cent use Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) without encryption or anti-malware.
Many organisations have already been at the sharp end of cloud security incidents. Nearly a quarter of respondents (23 per cent) report cloud provider data losses or breaches, and one in five reports unauthorised access to their organisations’ 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.
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, organisations 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.
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.
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 centralised control or orchestration of the myriad of cloud services and apps employees use across the enterprise.
