Growing confidence and emerging gaps in cloud security

Cloud maturity grows

The survey of over 850 security professionals from around the world reveals a growing confidence in public cloud deployments. Over two-fifths (44 percent) now believe public cloud environments to be as secure as on-premises environments, while 21 percent claim they are even more secure. What’s more, 60 percent say they are “fairly” or “very” confident that their organisation’s use of cloud technology is secure.

This makes sense. After all, cloud providers are capable of running more modern, secure infrastructure than many organisations could in-house. That means customers benefit from the latest technology, accredited to the highest security standards, versus heterogeneous, legacy-heavy in-house environments. As long as they pick the right third-party security partners and understand the concept of shared responsibility in the cloud, cyber risk can be mitigated effectively. The cloud even offers more options for backup and redundancy to further minimise risk.

Yet this isn’t the whole picture. Respondents to the study are still reluctant about hosting highly sensitive data in the cloud, with customer information (53 percent) and internal financial data (55 percent) topping the list. They complain of cybersecurity skills shortages (47 percent) and a lack of visibility (42 percent) as hampering cloud security efforts. And over half (56 percent) aren’t confident that their cloud set-up is compliant.

Could some of these concerns be linked to web application threats?

Websites under attack

The truth is that web apps are a ubiquitous but often poorly understood part of the modern cloud-centric organisation. As a business-critical method of delivering experiences to customers and productivity-enhancing capabilities to employees, web applications are a major target for cyber-criminals looking to steal sensitive data and interrupt key business processes. A Forrester study from 2018 found that the leading cause of successful breaches was external attacks — the most common of which focused on web applications (36 percent).

Fortunately, Barracuda Networks’ survey finds more than half (59 percent) of global firms have web app firewalls (WAFs) in place to mitigate these threats. The most popular option is sourcing a WAF from a third-party provider (32 percent), which makes sense, as long as they can protect customers from the automated bot-driven traffic that dominates the threat landscape. Not all can.

Patching and configuring

However, a greater concern is the fact that many organisations don’t appear to be taking the threat of web application vulnerabilities seriously. The Barracuda study found that 13 percent of respondents claim they haven’t patched their web application frameworks or servers at all over the past 12 months. Of those that did, it takes over a third (38 percent) of them between seven and 30 days to do so. For a fifth (21 percent), it takes over a month.

This is the kind of approach that landed Equifax in a heap of trouble when it failed to promptly patch an Apache Struts 2 flaw, leading to a mega-breach that has so far cost has over $1.4 billion. It’s an extreme example, but it is one that highlights the potential risks for businesses.

Another potential area of risk with web application environments is human error. A massive breach at Capital One earlier this year affected around 100 million customers and applicants, and it was blamed on a misconfiguration of an open source WAF.

Some 39 percent of respondents told Barracuda Networks they don’t have a WAF because they don’t process any sensitive information via their applications. But attacks aren’t just focused on stealing data. They can also impede mission-critical services. WAFs are certainly not a silver bullet. But as part of a layered approach to cybersecurity, they’re an important tool in the ongoing fight against business risk.

Conclusion

Growing cloud confidence is enabling digital transformations across organisations of every shape and size. However, that confidence comes with a cautionary tale. Attackers are also zeroing in on vulnerabilities and weaknesses that may have been ignored in the past, and many organisations are unaware of how these multi-layered attacks can unfold from a single access point. Web application security and cloud security posture are the key weapons customers need to deploy in order to continue their digital transformations safely in the cloud.

To ensure you are secure in the cloud, here are some tips: