Risks to Consider When Operating in the Cloud

According to a recent report by Lookout, 32% of remote workers use apps or software that have not been approved by IT, and 92% of remote workers conduct work-related tasks on their own tablet or smartphone. These devices, applications, and software, as well as the corporate data being accessed, are not visible to IT (shadow IT), which substantially increases the security risk of an organisation.

The background of World Cloud Security Day

World Cloud Security Day is a holiday sponsored by Lookout, a company specialising in endpoint and cloud security. The company’s unified, cloud-native security platform protects data across devices, apps, networks, and clouds, and enterprises of all sizes, government agencies, and millions of consumers rely on it.

The cloud has become an indispensable pillar of most organisations. In 2020, 61% of U.S. businesses will have transferred their workloads to the cloud to facilitate remote work and data accessibility. 60% of corporate data was stored in the cloud in 2002. In addition to providing flexibility and potential productivity enhancements, cloud computing has introduced an unidentifiable risk. As cloud operations become more widespread, security threats have also increased in frequency.

Continually evolving their techniques to take advantage of remote workers who use smartphones, tablets, and the public internet to connect to the cloud, threat actors continue to exploit remote workers who connect to the cloud via smartphones, tablets, and the public internet. Instead of sending fraudulent emails to desktop computers, attackers are customising their social engineering campaigns to utilise SMS text messages, social media apps, and other messaging-capable apps.

With the proliferation of cloud services, it has become more difficult to monitor the settings and update schedules of each service. As a result, misconfigurations and vulnerabilities become more prevalent, providing adversaries with additional opportunities to compromise the cloud data of an organisation or an individual.

Lookout launches the inaugural World Cloud Security Day to raise awareness of the hazards associated with remote work and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies.

Risks to Consider When Operating in the Cloud

The complexity and likelihood of misconfigurations increase as a result of the cloud’s configuration flexibility. Misconfigurations between systems create exploitable holes in the structure.

The number of human and service identities that must be managed increases with cloud configurations. Some organisations use access management solutions with step-up authentication to implement security. The issue is that these tools cannot secure app data and do not monitor or restrict user actions once they have entered your environment.

Increased cloud utilisation necessitates additional IT and security resources. A scarcity of qualified personnel is one of the greatest obstacles to securing data, applications, and systems.

Traditionally, appliance-based tools like VPN, on-premises secure web gateway (SWG), and data loss prevention (DLP) were deployed as stand-alone configurations, resulting in security vulnerabilities. A cloud-delivered security platform simplifies IT security by consolidating multiple discrete solutions.