Solving the Security Equation

Increased threats exploiting pandemic fears, and the shift away from the safety of a fixed office perimeter, resulted in the perfect storm for bad actors.

For many enterprises, this brought into question data security, leading them to turn to the cloud to provide resilience and robust protection.

However, this rush to the cloud often prevented organizations from assessing all. As discovered in the first part of Aptum’s 2022 Cloud Impact Study, organizations still have cloud blind spots leading some to consider reverting to traditional data infrastructures. As a result, many companies are now in the process of restructuring their solutions.

Surveying 400 senior IT professionals, the second part of Aptum’s 2022 Cloud Impact Study uncovers how organizations can improve security, compliance, data governance, and disaster recovery.

The Value of Cloud

With 91% of respondents agreeing that cloud computing is essential to data management, there is no doubt that companies know the value cloud computing holds when it comes to security.

One of the great benefits that the cloud offers is its cost-effectiveness. Cloud computing’s consumption-based pricing model regulates monthly costs, with companies only paying for what they use. Security is also built into this payment structure, making it an efficient way for businesses to reduce costs.

Increased security is another essential value of moving to the cloud, with 47% of respondents citing it as a critical factor. One of the reasons for this is the rise in cybercrime, making many organizations take shelter in the cloud and use it as their protection.

Resilience and disaster recovery were also among the main influences in moving to the cloud. With 40% of respondents agreeing resilience was a key driver for cloud computing investments, cloud services can offer robust and reliable infrastructure and improved backup and disaster recovery. With such a reliable and firm structure, businesses aren’t wasting time and money manually backing up and recovering data.

 Security complexities creating a barrier to cloud

 With companies taking on cloud services to support varying needs, there are increasing complexities. These bring about concerns and barriers that are affecting business outcomes, such as:

• Access – Secure access to the cloud is essential. Deciding and enforcing who has access to hybrid and multi-cloud environments is problematic, and access controls must become more complex.
• Visibility – 88% of respondents cite complete visibility into all cloud environments as one of their main security, compliance, and governance challenges. Without accurate insight, achieving proper visibility and seeing where all data is located is challenging.
• Detection and response – 9 in 10 respondents said they lack a transparent system and process to detect and respond to security threats across all cloud environments.
• Transfer – The transfer of data for hybrid and multi-cloud customers can be a real challenge since transferring data between multiple infrastructures can prove a weak spot for security.
• Compliance – Compliance rules and regulations are growing increasingly strict. 90% of respondents consider this a challenge with cloud computing.
• Service Level Agreements – 9 in 10 agree that providing internal service level agreements (SLAs) to businesses running their services in the cloud is challenging.

Weaving security into the fabric of your cloud strategy

These challenges stem from something that came up in the first part of Aptum’s 2022 Cloud Impact Study, concluding that there is a lack of holistic strategic thinking when tackling security within cloud transformation.

With only 20% of organizations surveyed taking a holistic cloud computing strategy, security has been majorly affected in cloud transformations. To ensure that security is part of the foundations of a cloud transformation, strategic thinking is needed in every corner of a company’s technical and business operations, especially with the complexity hybrid cloud brings.

Assessing your cloud readiness from the start of, and throughout, cloud design is key, and should include comprehensive analysis of the following:

• What are the different types of data you want to store?
• Who is using the cloud?
• How frequently?
• What is it being used for?

An extensive audit of these measures alongside established and desired business outcomes will aid enterprises in creating a suitable and secure cloud architecture that covers every layer of the estate, with security built in from design.

Follow the link to read the complete second part of Aptum’s 2022 Cloud Impact Study