As Cloud Adoption Grows, so Does the Risk of Misconfiguration

Migration of enterprise computing from data centers to public clouds was accelerated with the shift to remote work. In the aforementioned survey, 56% of respondents said they planned to be running half or more of their workloads in the cloud over the next 12-18 months. As cloud use increases, so does the likelihood of misconfiguration. Cloud misconfigurations occur when a user or team specifies settings that fail to provide adequate security for their cloud data.  Without strong security measures, attackers can exploit those misconfigurations to compromise or steal cloud data. In fact, Gartner estimates that through 2025, 99% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.

The Problem of Shared Responsibility

Currently, organizations that use the public cloud address security according to a shared responsibility model. This creates complexity because each cloud environment brings specific protocols, requirements and standards. As IT security teams work to make multi-cloud environments secure, they have a dual challenge. They must adopt the protocols of each cloud instance, and they must also find solutions with the flexibility to support security functionality within the context of the shared responsibility model. It must work for specific cloud environments and between clouds.