2019 Cloud Security Report

Organizations continue to adopt cloud computing at a rapid pace to benefit from the promise of increased efficiency, better scalability, and improved agility. While public cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) continue to expand security services to protect their evolving cloud platforms, it is ultimately the customers’ responsibility to secure their data within these cloud environments.

The 2019 Cloud Security Report highlights what is and what is not working for security operations teams in securing their cloud data, systems, and services in this shared responsibility model. The results are acontinuation of past challenges:

• Despite all of its benefits, cloud computing still bears challenges. Data security and general security risks (a total of 57%) made it to the top of the list of barriers to faster cloud adoption, followed by lack of budget (26%), compliance challenges (26%), and lack of qualified staff (26%).
• Legacy security tools are not designed for the dynamic, distributed, virtual environments of the cloud. 66% of respondents say traditional security solutions either don’t work at all or provide limited functionality in cloud environments.
• The biggest operational cloud security headaches IT organizations are struggling with are compliance and lack of visibility into infrastructure security (67% in total). Setting consistent security policies across cloud and on-premises environments and the continuing lack of qualified security staff are tied for third place (31% each).
• Unauthorized access and insecure interfaces tie for the number one spot as the biggest vulnerabilities to cloud security (42% each).
• The three most concerning cloud data leakage vectors include malware and ransomware (27%), compromised accounts (21%), and misconfigurations (20%).

Overall, the findings in this report emphasize that security teams must reassess their security posture and strategies, and address the shortcomings of legacy security tools to protect their evolving IT environments.

This 2019 Cloud Security Report was produced in June 2019 by Cybersecurity Insiders, the 400,000 member information security community, to explore how organizations are responding to the evolving security threats in the cloud.