Without a doubt, cloud computing offers numerous benefits to all businesses, brands and companies alike. Yet, these benefits are likely to be undermined by the fact, and action; that failure to maintain the proper protection for security and privacy during usage of cloud services can spell a lot of disasters.
In return, this leads firms to higher costs in maintaining cloud servers and a potential loss of business. It is hence key for firms to have a comprehensive and detailed understanding of potential security challenges and benefits coming with cloud computing, especially when shifting towards it.
Cloud security statistics worth understanding
Cheap DDoS protection might or might not be able to fully help cloud service providers and cloud servers in protection against DDoS and other online attacks. Yet, experts working at cybersecurity firms have collected important cloud security statistics that can provide anyone with enough information and insights when it comes to the arena of cloud security:
• When asked about the percentage of workloads companies are already holding in cloud servers, around 33% of them have more than 50% of their workloads in the cloud. This was observed in 2021.
• Most companies are implementing either a hybrid or a multiple cloud strategy (at around 71%) for the integration of multiple services, scalability, or business continuity purposes. Only a handful of companies are counting on a single cloud deployment plan (around 27%) for their needs whereas 76% of firms are using either two or more cloud service providers.
• Companies that struggled to implement proper cloud security resulted in more than 33 million records exposed in both 2018 and 2019, individually.
• The areas where organizations felt were the most important two years ago (in 2019) for improvement of security and visibility for using public cloud services were identification of software vulnerabilities and remediation standing at 29%, while identification of workload configuration out of compliance, especially those that were not adhering the industry standards and benchmarks stood at 27%, identification of misconfigured security groups at 25%, discovering public cloud resident sensitive data at 24% and third-party access to public cloud-resident data was at 23%.
• In an analysis of 196 data breaches due to wrong configurations of clouds, the researchers evaluated the kind of services involved in each incident. They found that elastic search misconfiguration cases stood at 44% of all records exposed in both 2018 and 2019. Also, the most common database breached across all platforms stood at 20%. Misconfigurations due to MongoDB accounted for almost 12% of all breaches that took place.
• When organizational executives were asked for ranking their firm’s maturity with running a data platform in the cloud, 23% were deployed in the cloud and stated it work quite well while 29% stated they were running a data platform in the cloud and were still working out the wrinkles while only 3% state that nothing was working well. The remaining respondents reveal they were either not on the cloud or wish to get out of the cloud but did not start any planning for that.
• 68 percent of companies reveal that cloud account takeovers were a monumental security risk and the threat they face while 51 percent state that phishing was among the most frequent methods attackers used for acquiring legitimate cloud credentials.
• 30 percent of executives surveyed revealed that their company’s end-users were responsible for ensuring the security of SaaS applications in their firms. While 24 percent state that the responsibilities are share between their firm and that of cloud service providers. Also, 20 percent mentioned that their company’s IT security team is most responsible.
• The average financial losses caused each year due to compromised cloud servers accounted for nearly USD$ 6.2 million
• Almost 80% of respondents indicate last year that having consistent integrate security and governance for their data store in the public, private, and the hybrid cloud was quite important. A small minority said it wasn’t important.
Conclusion
Some will find it surprising while others will find it unsurprising, but it is true that cloud security when compromised can become a really big problem. These statistics should be an eye-opener and must help IT divisions at many firms reconsider their cloud security, management, deployment, and operations.