Cloud Security, Cloud Security

70% of companies say migrating to the cloud top priority

Visitors arrive at the cloud pavillion of Amazon Web Services at a technology trade fair on March 14, 2016, in Hanover, Germany. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Equinix earlier this week released a report that said 70% of respondents believe migrating to the cloud has become a top priority, with 80% focused on digitizing their infrastructure.

Based on a global study of 2,600 IT decision-makers, the Equinix study also found that 37% of companies say they plan to move business-critical applications to the cloud, and as IT leaders go more digital, some 47% of their IT infrastructure globally now runs on the cloud.

It’s no surprise that organizations are accelerating the migration to the cloud, said John Morgan, CEO at Confluera. Morgan said while security concerns are valid given the current cyber threat landscape, organizations now have an opportunity to take a fresh approach to cloud security. Morgan added that the security challenges of the cloud are unique with its ephemeral nature, larger attack surfaces and ubiquitous access.

“Trying to extend security solutions architected for on-premises solutions to the cloud will undoubtedly result in a lack of visibility and less than desired results,” Morgan said. “With the strategic importance of cloud migration, organizations have an opportunity to architect robust security strategies, leveraging all the tools and resources specifically designed to address cloud security challenges.”

 Tim Bach, vice president of engineering at AppOmni, said the core security challenges of cloud migration are the same for security teams as they are for the organizations they are securing. Bach said more data and workloads in the cloud means added systems with sensitive data to secure. Most notably, over the past year and a half, Bach said we’ve continued to see danger in the proliferation of third-party cloud-to-cloud connections and over-provisioned users and applications. 

“Accelerated cloud migration means that security team workloads are as high as they’ve ever been,” Bach said. “My recommendation to security leaders is to identify posture management tooling that can be deployed to augment manual efforts and continuously monitor entitlements in SaaS. Prioritize tooling that can integrate with existing security stacks so that teams don’t need to create new workflows and commitments to support newly critical SaaS deployments. Utilizing newly-available automated solutions can free-up the team to focus on the strategic shift to the cloud rather than needing to manually track every user and connected application.”

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