Cloud Security Challenges 2021

According to industry reports, the cloud migration services market is forecast to grow to $9.5 billion by 2022. Touting perks like scalability, increased efficiency and faster deployment, more organisations are gradually migrating to the cloud platforms or are thinking about moving in the cloud.

In this scenario, cybersecurity experts continue to show concerns about data security and systems security in the cloud. To prioritise your security investment and take an informed decision about cloud security, one must understand the various challenges that come along with it. Through this article, we will discuss the top cloud security challenges that need attention when thinking of jumping into the cloud in 2021:

The Widening Cloud Security Skill Gap

In a recent survey, about 86% of IT decision-makers agreed that a shortage of qualified workforce is responsible for making cloud projects slow. A cloud project requires candidates to ace both DevOps in addition to security and compliance. Seems like a small issue? Well, it is just the tip of the iceberg. With tech giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon luring skilled IT force, the non-tech sector and SMEs have to adjust with a minimal talent for their organisations. It means that even if SMEs have enough capital to invest in the cloud, there is no talent to uphold the cutting edge technology they can afford. Another challenge that comes along here is the steep learning curve for cloud stakeholders. Even after filling the roles, the employee is expected to stay updated with cloud architecture, security and compliance and business intelligence.

Dependence on Outdated Security Solutions

Many standard security tools fall short of providing complete protection to the cloud environment in the present scenario with sophisticated threats and dynamic needs of organisations. One such example is the legacy Cloud Security Posture Management solutions that rely on historical data to get security notifications. These solutions often fail to recognise new threats as well as the context around them. Thus, this year brings a big challenge for organisations in finding solutions that provide a holistic approach to cloud security, emphasising reducing the false positives and intensifying protection against unknown threats.

APIs as a Threat Vector

A study by Imperva stated that more than 66% of organisations expose APIs to the public for stakeholders like business partners and developers to access software platforms. Gartner also predicted that by 2022, APIs will become the number one attack vectors. Earlier, companies used to have a limited number of APIs for internal or partner systems. Today they are used heavily in mobile applications, cloud-based applications, IoT devices, communications, analytics, etc. With the rising dependence on APIs in the cloud environment, protecting against malicious attacks through their exploitation remains a challenge even today. APIs created without proper authentication control and authorisation increase the risk surface in the cloud environment.

Possibility of Misconfigurations 

It is very natural to expect complete security from your cloud service providers. However, the configuration in the cloud security model is an exception. It is fair to believe that it is a shared responsibility between organisations and security providers. A cloud misconfiguration does not require much tech-savviness to compromise the security of an organisation. It can be as innocent as accidental misconfiguring of privacy settings that expose the company's sensitive information. In 2018, misconfigured Google groups settings leaked data from over 9600 organisations that made information like emails, user names, passwords, and financial data publically searchable.

No Lack of Cloud Security Architecture and Strategy. 

While migrating to the cloud, organisations face challenges in maintaining cybersecurity resilience. It is important to note that not all security policies can be uniformly implemented in a multi-cloud environment. Many existing vendor solutions do not support popular cloud platforms or native cloud integrations that create an inconsistency in the security framework. Building a strong cloud architecture and security strategy is thus a challenge to successfully migrate without creating security blind spots.

Cloud Usage Visibility

The shared responsibility cloud model expects the public cloud user to manage data and traffic flows responsibly. It is challenging for an organisation to figure out which cloud access is safe. In addition to this, the employees' unfamiliarity with proper access makes sensitive data vulnerable. Inadequate visibility of cloud assets in complex multi-cloud environments makes it hard for organisations to effectively monitor users who access the cloud service/application, source of traffic, and misconfigured controls.

Conclusions 

On average, it takes 38 Days to patch a vulnerability. This has pushed the cloud owners to re-think their priorities for cloud security. As the cloud continues to get heavily adopted, organisations need to be aware of the cloud security challenges in order to leverage the benefits of cloud computing and also create a wholesome security strategy that effectively mitigates these issues.

Author Bio

Rob McFeely is the co-founder at Octiga, a Microsoft Office 365 security automation company based in Galway. He brings 10 years of experience in enterprise software development. In his free time, he likes to educate organisations of all sizes on cloud cyber security best practices.