How Enhancing Cloud Visibility Can Help Minimize Security Concerns in 2022

Adopting multi-cloud strategies and the transition to public cloud is becoming the new normal, thus widening an already vulnerable attack surface. Resolving cloud security issues within the cloud environment itself won’t let the companies struggle with complex cloud security issues. This article is my attempt to show how organizations can minimize cloud security concerns by maximizing their investment in visibility. Read on to learn more.

Today, on the heels of a mass digital transformation movement and an industry-wide exodus to the cloud, cloud complexity is at an all-time high, and bad actors are having a field day. In fact, Cybersecurity Ventures predictsOpens a new window that by 2031, ransomware will cost victims up to $265 billion annually.

What’s more, as gaps between hybrid cloud environments, i.e., on-prem and in the public cloud – persist, organizations are finding more risks in their intra-cloud environments than they realized. But all too often, they are finding these gaps retroactively, once the damage has alreadyOpens a new window been done. That’s why the need for end-to-end IT visibility across the security ecosystem has never been more vital for business resiliency than in 2022.  

See More: Multi-cloud Adoption Will Rise Till 2024 But Adoption Challenges Could Spoil the Party

Cyber Concerns Grow as Cloud Complexity Rises

According to the GartnerOpens a new window Hype Cycle for Cloud Security, “By 2023, 70% of all enterprise workloads will be deployed in cloud infrastructure and platform services, up from 40% in 2020. Through 2025, more than 99% of cloud breaches will have a root cause of preventable misconfigurations or mistakes by end users.” But it’s important to note you have to see misconfigurations and mistakes to fix them.

While organizations across sectors continue to rely on the agility and innovation afforded by the cloud to accelerate their ongoing digital transformation initiatives, they also need purpose-built tools to address the unique security needs posed by this dynamic environment – complexity, gaps between cloud environments, access and usage concerns, and the list goes on. 

And not just tools that identify where bad actors have the potential to take advantage of vulnerable points in cloud infrastructure, i.e., “Can somebody access my s3 buckets?” – but also solutions that unearth unseen risks that currently exist in your environment. Sometimes you need to know your applications are doing something before formulating the right “can” question. And it’s that actual but unknown behavior of your applications that can hide its shadow attack surfaces. Because in today’s risk landscape, where bad actors are evolving and refining their tactics day in and day out, it’s not the matter if attackers will break through to your data center, cloud, or hybrid cloud environments, but a matter of when. 

SecOps teams today need a real-time understanding of the communications happening across their hybrid cloud environments to manage and minimize threat potential. In essence, this visibility translates to data points that can better inform security teams and business leaders of what has happened in the past and what is happening across the ecosystem now and help teams better understand what could happen in the future.  

See More: Why You Should Mind the SaaS Gap in Your Cloud Data Protection Strategy

Bracing for More Cloud Overlap – and Threat Potential

Visibility is a lot like a superpower, and it will become even more essential for SecOps success in the new year as cloud complexity worsens, more organizations marry their cloud and data center ecosystems, and enterprises increasingly move to hybrid and multi cloud environments. Gartner notesOpens a new window that in 2020, “the combined end-user spending on cloud services totaled $270 billion. In 2021, this is expected to increase by 23.1 percent to a staggering $332.3 billion. By 2022, projections indicate that this figure will rise to $397.5 billion.”

But as cloud investment grows and migration efforts accelerate, not only will pre-existing gaps between cloud and data center environments become all the more tempting for bad actors, but new gaps will continue to emerge. For example, as more users within the enterprise gain configuration access to different aspects of the cloud environment, the potential for insider threats will only increase. 

The bottom line is this: securing the middle area is a real challenge anytime there’s a surface between two distinct infrastructure types. Organizations with dynamic cloud environments are just now realizing how many holes they have in their current cybersecurity posture – but they’re often finding these gaps retroactively. For enhanced visibility in the cloud (and across the organization), SecOps teams need to leverage solutions that can pinpoint if and how they have already been breached to plan for preventative detection and remediation in the future proactively.

In 2022, minimizing your cloud security concerns begins with maximizing your investment in visibility. This means prioritizing technology that monitors and manages all communications between workloads and applications across the entirety of increasingly distributed business estates. It’s about finding those unknown and unseen risks in real-time and ultimately empowering understaffed SecOps teams to protect their organizations better, particularly as cloud complexity worsens and bad actors grow more ruthless and cunning by the day. 

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