Cloud complexities, skills-shortage challenge firms: Report

A large number of organisations are both struggling to manage the complexity of securing their cloud infrastructure across multiple cloud platforms and suffering a cyber-skills and knowledge shortage, says a recent report by a global provider of security solutions.

Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd  .  has released its 2022 Cloud Security Report, which finds that organisations continue to adopt the cloud, with 35 percent running more than 50 percent of their workloads on the likes of Azure, AWS and GCP.

The global report, based on a survey of 775 cyber security professionals, also reveals that cloud security incidents were up 10 percent from the previous year with 27 percent of organisations now citing misconfiguration, way ahead of issues like exposed data or account compromise.

Organisations are struggling to bring security into the DevOps cycle, compounded by a skills shortage witnessed by 45 percent of companies. Only 16 percent of respondents said they had comprehensive DevSecOps in place and 37 percent were just starting to implement DevSecOps into their cloud application development process.

TJ Gonen, VP of Cloud Security at Check Point, said: “It is clear from this independent survey that security teams are finding the increased reliance on the cloud a bit of a challenge. Faced with the skills shortage, organisations need to do everything they can to simplify their cloud security management. An integrated third-party solution that covers all cloud platforms with a single management dashboard would relieve much of the pressure and reduce the risk of increasingly common misconfigurations, while also reducing workloads and providing the security environment to develop, deploy and manage applications in the cloud. This was the key driver for Check Point to develop its CloudGuard cloud security suite.”

While perceived cost savings and ease of use were the original drivers for using cloud vendor security, there is an increasing realisation that the complexity of managing three or four different security platforms argues in favour of an independent cloud security solution to streamline security across all cloud platforms. In fact, 54 percent of those surveyed thought that an independent security vendor would be better suited to their needs than the cloud platform provider. A key consideration in making the decision between cloud native and a third-party security vendor was a potential reduction in complexity provided by an integrated solution, cited by 56 percent of respondents.

There is also an increasing need to deploy application protection in the cloud with this capability going up by 11 percent in the last year to become the 3^rd highest area of focus, quoted by 53 percent of the survey sample. According to the report, 57 percent of respondents say that they expect to run more than half their workloads in the cloud within the next 12 to 18 months and, of those, some 76 percent were using two or more cloud providers.

As the move to the cloud gathers pace, the ability to streamline cloud security becomes vital, as 75 percent of organisations are in favour of a single unified security platform with single dashboard, where they can configure all the policies needed to protect data in the cloud. Currently, 80 percent have to juggle three, or more separate security solution dashboards to configure their enterprise cloud footprint.