About 70 per cent of cybersecurity professionals working in large organisations across Europe and the Middle East has said that a rush to the cloud is not taking full account of the security risks
This is highlighted by a new cloud security study conducted for Palo Alto Networks®, the next-generation security company.
The survey shows that cybersecurity professionals recognise that they must do much more to match the pace of the business on cloud, but that security is too often viewed as a business inhibitor when new applications and services are adopted. Among the findings:
· More a half (54 per cent) of cybersecurity professionals in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UAE and Saudi Arabia report misalignment, between them and the rest of business, on cloud and cybersecurity issues, including cybersecurity’s role in making cloud adoption successful.
· Despite most cybersecurity professionals (64 per cent) saying security is a top priority for their adoption of the public cloud, less than half of respondents are very confident that existing cybersecurity in the public cloud is working well, even for sensitive areas like finance.
· Only around one in 10 (13 per cent) cybersecurity professionals said they were able to maintain a consistent, enterprise-class cybersecurity across their cloud(s), networks and endpoints. Indeed, around half (49 per cent) of respondents’ organisations said that they take different, segmented approaches to cybersecurity today, but would like to have the same consistent visibility, command and control over cybersecurity across all areas.
· Cybersecurity professionals feel under-consulted on cloud security and want more control. Only 19 per cent said that they have the correct level of involvement in the security of cloud services. Notably, even those who report that they have an extremely high level of involvement would like more control over cloud cybersecurity, as they are the group of professionals most likely (57 per cent) to say they need even greater control and consistency of cloud cybersecurity.
Greg Day, vice-president and regional chief security officer for EMEA at Palo Alto Networks, commented, “The adoption of the cloud is driven by the desire for more agile, innovative digital operations that cybersecurity needs to emulate. This is vital as cybersecurity professionals can often find it tough to keep pace and may fear the rest of the organisation wrongly believes cybersecurity is an obstacle when, actually, it can help realise cloud ambitions. For cybersecurity to be as agile as business demands, today’s EMEA cybersecurity leadership needs to maintain firm and consistent control over cybersecurity across all environments, including cloud and multi-cloud.”
Day concluded, “Cloud is changing how IT is consumed and will also change how cybersecurity is consumed. It will enable organisations to gather and crunch a much richer and broader security dataset, run big data risk analytics and machine learning to stop threats faster, and access limitless compute muscle to enforce prevention comprehensively. Critically, all of this is done at the digital pace necessary to identify risks and prevent attacks that undermine digital trust.”
