A revealing report from cloud infrastructure management authority, Brainboard.co, has brought to light a severe crisis in cloud security. The findings illustrate that security professionals are engrossed in managing emergencies 80% of their time, which are due to easily avoidable misconfigurations in cloud settings.
Per the report, cloud security mechanisms are inundated with roughly 500 security alerts each week. The financial implications of a data breach in cloud environments average over $4 million, delineating a critical challenge for the sector that detracts from the capacity to adopt preemptive security strategies that might otherwise fortify organizational security postures.
Human Error
The predominant factor in 55% of cloud security breaches is human error, with the report noting that a significant majority of cloud and DevOps engineers, over 60%, are at a junior level and might inadvertently introduce security flaws.
Chafik Belhaoues, co-founder & CEO of Brainboard, observed: “This statistic makes it abundantly clear that relying solely on human vigilance in a complex cloud environment can lead to severe consequences.
“The fact is, organizations simply cannot afford to wait to be hacked before taking action, and taking a reactive approach is extremely expensive and unsustainable, especially with modern and sophisticated attack systems.
“The only way to remedy that is to adopt a proactive approach to security in a way that helps engineers build secure-by-design systems.”
Proactive Security in the Cloud
Chafik advocates for a series of measures to foster proactive cloud security.
He added: “The first big step to implementing proactive security for cloud architectures is to have an internal approved and secure library of building blocks that engineers can build with.
“Secondly, having a short security feedback loop that is close to users, such as ‘security shift left’, helps them build secure-by-design patterns.
“Finally, you can limit the blast radius by building isolated small cloud infrastructures. This reduces the impact to only the scoped environments or stacks.”
For further insight into securing your cloud infrastructure, visit www.brainboard.co.