Things are far from happy in cloud-land, it seems. Around 48 percent of Australian organisations have reported that their cloud security arrangements aren’t keeping up with the pace of change – and 95 percent of Aussie IT teams have reported issues on keeping tabs on their rapidly growing cloud workloads, according to a new Symantec report.
Some 30 percent admit they have not been able to address all their security alerts, and 79pc say the use of personal accounts and lack of multi-factor authentication has resulted in at least one cloud “incident”, the report says – though it’s not clear how many of these “incidents” proved to be malicious.
Admittedly, the task of guarding cloud operations is getting tougher. Australian organisations on average are now managing no fewer than 1807 cloud apps, the report reveals.
These figures are taken from Symantec’s global Cloud Security Threat Report, published this week. It claims that worldwide cloud security is being undermined by immature security practices, overtaxed IT staff and risky end-user behaviour.
Says Nico Popp, senior veep of cloud and information protection, at Symantec: “The adoption of new technology has almost always led to gaps in security, but we’ve found the gap created by cloud computing poses a greater risk than we realise, given the troves of sensitive and business-critical data stored in the cloud.
“In fact, our research shows that 69pc of organisations believe their data is already on the Dark Web for sale and fear an increased risk of data breaches due to their move to cloud.”
And then there’s the problem of what Symantec calls “rampant risky user behaviour”. The survey indicates that nearly one in three employees exhibit risky behaviour in the cloud, and 85 percent are not using best security practices.
To no-one’s great surprise, Symantec advises investment in “cloud cyber security platforms that leverage automation and AI to supplement visibility and overtaxed human resources”.
