Partner POV | Cloud Resources Have Become Biggest Targets for Cyberattacks

This article is written and contributed by our partner, Thales.

• Cloud Security spending now tops all other security spending categories
• Nearly half (47%) of all corporate data stored in the cloud is sensitive
• 44% of organizations have experienced a cloud data breach with 14% having had one in past year
• Nearly half of organizations cite it is more difficult to manage compliance and privacy in the cloud vs. on-premises
• Nearly a third (31%) of organizations recognize the importance of digital sovereignty initiatives as a means of future-proofing their cloud environments

As the use of the cloud continues to be strategically vital to many organizations, cloud resources have become the biggest targets for cyber-attacks, with SaaS applications (31%), Cloud Storage (30%) and Cloud Management Infrastructure (26%) cited as the leading categories of attack. As a result, protecting cloud environments has risen as the top security priority ahead of all other security disciplines.

This comes as organizations continue to experience cloud data breaches. Forty-four percent of organizations have experienced a cloud data breach with 14% reported having an incident in the last 12 months. Human error and misconfiguration continued to lead the top root cause of these breaches (31%), followed by exploiting known vulnerabilities (28%), and failure to use Multi-Factor Authentication (17%).

Growing cloud usage across enterprises has seen an accompanying growth in the potential attack surface for threat actors, with 66% of organizations using more than 25 SaaS applications and nearly half (47%) of corporate data being sensitive. Despite the increased risks to sensitive data in the cloud, the data encryption rates remain low, with less than 10% of enterprises encrypting 80% or more of their sensitive cloud data.

As organizations gain more experience in using cloud computing, many have modernized their investments to meet new security challenges. For organizations that prioritized digital sovereignty as an emerging security concern, refactoring applications to logically separate, secure, store, and process cloud data was the top way they would attain or achieve sovereignty initiatives ahead of other measures such as repatriating workloads back to on-premises or in-territory. Future-proofing cloud environments (31%) was the number one driver behind digital sovereignty initiatives, while adhering to regulations came in at a distant second at 22%.