SBN

Gartner says cloud remains top emerging enterprise risk

Despite having made great inroads into organizations and representing what Gartner calls novel opportunities, enterprises still view cloud computing as an emerging risk, according to Gartner’s latest quarterly Emerging Risks Report.

The 110 senior executives in risk, audit, finance, and compliance at large global organizations that were queried for the report, identified cloud computing as the top concern for the second consecutive quarter. Other cybersecurity risks include breach disclosure and attaining GDPR compliance, ranked among the top five concerns of the executives surveyed, according to this Gartner news release.

The survey also showed that social engineering attacks and being tripped up by GDPR were viewed as having the most potential to quickly cripple an organization. Interestingly, only 18 percent of the executives surveyed considered social engineering to be a significant current enterprise risk.

“Executives should expect cybersecurity threats to affect organizations in unpredictable ways,” Gartner wrote. “Through 2022, at least 95 percent of cloud security failures will be the fault of the organization. As more sophisticated tactics such as social engineering are engineered to compromise sensitive data, organizations should expand their cybersecurity team to address evolving digital risks,” the news release stated.

In a prior release, Gartner forecast the public cloud market will reach $300 billion in revenue by 2021. “Although public cloud revenue is growing more strongly than initially forecast, Gartner still expects growth rates to stabilize from 2018 onward, reflecting the increasingly mainstream status and maturity that public cloud services will gain within a wider IT spending mix,” Gartner said.

The growth in cloud computing is fueled by companies driving their digital transformation efforts, and cloud provides the most cost-effective access to agile computing resources.

Despite the great focus on cloud security, many enterprises are still struggling with securing their cloud deployments. “Despite record spending on information security in the last two years, organizations have lost an estimated $400 billion to cyber theft and fraud worldwide.,” Gartner said.  “As cybersecurity events and data breaches increase, it is imperative that organizations elevate IT security to a board-level topic and an essential part of any solid digital business growth strategy.”

“Executives are right to expand cloud services as part of their digital business initiatives, but they need to ensure their cloud security strategy keeps up with this growth,” said Matthew Shinkman, practice leader at Gartner. “Leaders should start by clearly identifying their most at-risk areas.”

Much of this explains why, according to a news release issued last week, Gartner estimates worldwide spending on information security products and services will reach more than $114 billion in 2018, an increase of 12.4 percent from last year. However, that growth is only anticipated to reach 8.7 percent in 2019 and reach $124 billion.

What else may be driving the demand for information security gear and services? According to Gartner, it’s cyberattack detection and response, as well as privacy.

None of these trends look to change any time soon.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Cybersecurity Matters – DXC Blogs authored by Cybersecurity Matters. Read the original post at: https://blogs.dxc.technology/2018/08/30/gartner-says-cloud-remains-top-emerging-enterprise-risk/