Why taking charge of cloud security is a number one priority for Middle East businesses?

• It is clear that businesses do not have the same level of confidence or expertise to configure security in cloud computing environments compared to on-premises.
• Unifying the visibility of multi-cloud environments and continuous intelligent monitoring of all cloud resources are essential in an effective cloud security solution.

Cloud adoption remains one of the most critical elements of digital transformation and growth for many enterprises. It can help companies deliver applications and services to customers with both speed and scalability.

But, the reality is many businesses still haven’t gotten to grips with how to monitor for and detect threats in the cloud. This lack of knowledge coupled with security policies that don’t encompass the cloud and a shortage of cybersecurity expertise relevant to cloud environments is a recipe for disaster.

Data shows that almost half of the more than 2,500 disclosed cloud-related vulnerabilities recorded to date were revealed in the last 18 months, emphasising the need for any security team to manage this growing risk closely. 

Real meaning of cloud security

There is no doubt that cloud computing is advantageous to all businesses. Cloud computing allows companies to reduce costs, accelerate deployments, and rapidly develop. On the other hand, protecting the cloud means securing an increasingly large attack surface that ranges from cloud workloads to the virtual servers and other technologies that underpin the cloud environment. 

Cloud security is the technology, policies, services, and controls to protect the cloud’s data, applications, and environments. Effective cloud security should focus on ensuring data privacy across networks, handling the unique cybersecurity concerns of businesses using multiple cloud services providers, and controlling the access of users, devices, and software. 

Vulnerable nature of the cloud

Data breaches are the number one concern of any business today. Research shows that data breach costs, in 2021, rose from $3.86 million to $4.24 million. Also, the techniques adversaries use to infiltrate the cloud differ from on-premise environments.

Malware attacks are far less prevalent. Nowadays, attackers exploit misconfigurations, inadequate access restrictions, stolen credentials, and other vulnerabilities.

Another major problem is organisations using more than one cloud provider, a common scenario when cloud migration occurs organically over time, which can cause an immediate visibility issue.

This creates endpoints, workloads and traffic that is not properly monitored, leaving security gaps often exploited by attackers, known as blind spots.

Also, companies often provide employees with far more privileges and permissions than needed to perform their job, which increases identity-based threats. Bad actors will carry out a technique known as password spraying.

Here, they will carry out an automated password guessing game to enter the company’s cloud. Research shows that 100 per cent of X-Force Red penetration tests of cloud environments found issues with either passwords or policies. 

Threat actors will deploy several different attack methods to compromise a business’ cloud environment. On-premise cloud pivot is also a common technique that involves threat actors infiltrating an end-user or system hosted on-premise and then shifting their access to the cloud.

Also, with the increased number of employees working from home, another point of entry for adversaries is via remote access exploitation that is often not sufficiently secured. Alternatively, attackers can profit from cloud vulnerabilities by installing crypto miners onto a company’s system.

Cryptocurrency mining is an activity that requires large amounts of computing power and bad actors will use a compromised cloud server to carry out this process and extract as much profit as possible whilst simultaneously using up the company’s resources. 

Effective security is the only way 

It is clear that businesses do not have the same level of confidence or expertise to configure security in cloud computing environments compared to on-premises. In actuality, closing the door on misconfigurations and vulnerabilities is the most basic layer of defence. The best cloud security solutions offer much more. 

Unifying the visibility of multi-cloud environments and continuous intelligent monitoring of all cloud resources are essential in an effective cloud security solution. That unified visibility must be able to detect misconfigurations, vulnerabilities and security threats while providing actionable insights and guided remediation. 

The core of any successful cloud security solution should always be up-to-date threat intelligence. Adversaries are constantly finding new ways to target the cloud and search for any weaknesses they can exploit.

Having the latest data about threat actors and their tactics and then applying it to breach detection is an absolute must. Threat intelligence enables security teams to anticipate upcoming threats and prioritise them effectively to preempt them.

Delivering all this functionality from the cloud and for the cloud provides organisations with the prevention, detection, visibility and response capabilities they need to beat attackers time and time again.

Lastly, it’s essential to have the right security policies in place that enforces golden cloud security standards that meet industry and government regulations across the entire infrastructure.

This includes everything from multi-factor authentication to general cybersecurity hygiene practices for all employees and robust incident response that ensures the company is on the front foot when the time of attack happens. 

Weighing up the differences between cloud security solutions is not simple. Any security team needs to ensure that the vendor’s specifications fit their specific company’s needs.

The best solutions will leverage real-time indicators of attack and threat intelligence to deliver hyper-accurate detections, protection and remediation.

• Roland Daccache is the Systems Engineering Manager for META at CrowdStrike.