Did you know that the volume of attacks on cloud services more than doubled in 2019? According to the 2020 Trustwave Global Security Report, cloud environments are now the third most targeted environment for cyber attacks. While these incidents are on the rise, migrating to the cloud is no longer optional for many organizations, due to the widespread shift to remote work. In today’s ever-evolving, dynamic security landscape, mitigating risk effectively requires thorough cloud security monitoring and continued visibility into your expanding attack surface.
Understanding the unique security challenges and requirements
According to Gartner, up to 60% of organizations will use an external service provider’s cloud managed service offering by 2022 — doubling the percentage from 2018. Given this trend, it’s more important than ever that organizations understand the shared responsibility model.
The cloud shared responsibility model essentially outlines that the cloud provider is in charge of securing the cloud architecture itself, while the customer is responsible for securing the data and apps stored in that cloud instance. Unfortunately, this model makes it difficult for many organizations to understand what portion of risk they own and manage versus their cloud providers. In a recent survey conducted by Oracle and KPMG, only 10% of CISOs reported that they fully understood the shared responsibility model, while 82% claimed to have experienced security events due to confusion in the model.
It’s clear that mitigating third-party cyber risk effectively requires you to understand how this model operates with each of your cloud vendors — and ensure each instance is configured securely. According to the Oracle and KPMG Cloud Threat Report 2020, organizations who discovered misconfigured cloud services experienced 10 or more data loss incidents in the last year.
Cloud security monitoring: Discover and mitigate risk effectively
When it comes to effective cloud security posture management, one of the biggest challenges is gaining an ecosystem-wide view into all of your digital assets. After all, you can’t secure what you can’t see.
Unfortunately, according to the 2019 Cloud Security Report, the top two security headaches security operation centers are struggling with are compliance (34%) and lack of visibility into infrastructure security (33%).
As the attack surface continues to expand and the workforce becomes increasingly remote, gaining this context has become more complex than ever. Without continuous visibility into all the assets that comprise your ever-growing digital ecosystem, it’s difficult to identify hidden risks lurking in the shadows.
Bitsight Attack Surface Analytics empowers you to shine a light on your expanding attack surface — across on-premise and remote office environments. Through a centralized cyber security dashboard, you can see where all your assets are located — broken down by geography and business unit — and assess the corresponding risk that each asset presents.
And with our Work From Home-Remote Office solution, you can gain additional context into the cyber risk associated with the expanded attack surface created by unmonitored and insecure home and remote offices.
With this increased visibility into your digital ecosystem, you can:
- Discover Shadow IT: Assess hidden assets and cloud instances for risk and bring them into line with your corporate security policies.
- Identify areas of concentrated risk: Continuously monitor for and identify gaps in cloud security controls, such as misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and unpatched systems.
- Allocate security resources efficiently: Make data-driven, risk-based decisions on how to prioritize resources — and focus remediation efforts on the areas that can have the biggest impact.
The need for visibility
While moving corporate data to the cloud is now a necessity, this process has become increasingly challenging from a cybersecurity perspective. In order to maintain the desired security posture, you must have a thorough understanding of where all your assets live and any inherent risk present there.
Want to learn more about how to gain broad visibility into your cloud attack surface? Download our ebook, Visualize and Assess Cyber Risk Across Your Digital Ecosystem.