Digital attackers are increasingly turning their attention to the cloud. According to the 2020 Trustwave Global Security Report, the volume of attacks targeting cloud services more than doubled 7% in 2018 to 20% a year later. This growth made cloud services the third most-targeted environment after corporate and e-commerce at 54% and 22%, respectively.

These trends highlight the need for organizations to secure their cloud environments. Provided below are some things they should keep in mind along the way.

CSPs – Configurations and More

First, it’s important to point out that organizations are constantly shifting in their preferences for Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). A large majority of customers currently have AWS or Microsoft Azure. However, some customers have a hybrid of both AWS and Azure, and we are even starting to see a few customers adopt Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This points to an important realization: organisations need to multi-skill their employees to support these vastly different cloud platforms as they continue to undergo their digital transformations.

Fostering skills across multiple CSPs is an important matter of security. Oftentimes, we see single-skilled workers try to adopt security on CSPs that they are not familiar with. Such unfamiliarity could produce a misconfiguration that could enable attackers to access an organization’s sensitive information.

Traditionally, those misconfiguration events involved storage silos like Buckets, Blobs, etc. A number of customers had misconfigured storage that faced the public a while back. That’s what the malicious hackers look for – potential intellectual property or customer information in an insecure bucket. However, CSPs are now providing these services at a secure (private) state by default, so you would have to change it to a public-facing state deliberately going forward.

That raises an important question: should you adopt the default security configuration for your CSP in (Read more...)