The demand for cloud computing has skyrocketed in recent years. Lower costs, a faster time to market, increased employee productivity, scalability, and flexibility are some of the beneficial factors motivating organizations to move to the cloud. It’s not likely that organizations will slow down with their migration plans, either. According to market estimates, the global cloud computing market size is projected to grow from USD 272.0 billion in 2018 to USD 623.3 billion by 2023 at a CAGR of 18.0%.

Simultaneously, the coronavirus pandemic has led to a sudden boom in the cloud industry as companies have to increasingly rely on remote working.

The transition to the cloud has brought new security challenges, however. According to IDC, around 30% of surveyed companies purchased 30+ types of cloud services from 16 different vendors in 2019 alone. This makes these organizations vulnerable to cyberattacks; cybercriminals are preying upon these entities by abusing configuration errors as well as vulnerabilities within the applications, which often remained undetected by the organization due to the skill gap.

Abhijit Chakravorty, cloud security competency leader at IBM Security Services, summarized the impact of the cloud this way:

The cloud holds enormous potential for business efficiency and innovation, but it can also create a ‘wild west’ of broader and more distributed environments for organizations to manage and secure.

Here are some of the top cloud security risks that organizations should keep in mind going forward.

Exploiting Cloud Apps

According to the recent case study by IBM X-Force IRIS, cloud-based applications are the most common path for cybercriminals for compromising cloud environments. They accounted for 45% of cloud-related cyber threats in IBM’s study.

Ransomware

Ransomware is one of the biggest cyber threats confronting the cloud industry. Ransomware was deployed three times more than (Read more...)