AS ORGANIZATIONS INCREASINGLY TURN TO HYBRID PUBLIC AND PRIVATE CLOUDS to ensure uptime, accelerate innovation, and meet customer service demands, they confront a unique set of security challenges.
A 2019 report by the SANS Institute found that 19% of organizations surveyed had experienced unauthorized access to their cloud environments, up from 12% two years before. Survey respondents cited unauthorized access as their No. 1 concern around cloud environments. More than half of the respondents also expressed concern that they couldn’t tell what data of theirs was being processed in the cloud.
Recent high-profile cloud-based attacks, such as the ATP 10 attacks that surfaced in late 2018, further add to the concerns of organizations depending on cloud environments. Increasingly stringent regulatory standards also challenge organizations charged with safeguarding and monitoring critical data. The SANS Institute report found that more than half (54%) of the organizations surveyed were adjusting their cloud strategies to meet evolving regulations.
All of these challenges hit the financial services industry particularly hard. For them, data quite literally is money, and companies are especially vulnerable to reputational damage. Even so, institutions must migrate to the cloud to stay competitive.