No less than 58% of UK business decision-makers have admitted that security remains the biggest barrier to public cloud adoption in their organisations. That’s according to new research recently commissioned by Centrify, the provider of privileged access management solutions.
The research, conducted by independent polling agency Censuswide via a survey of 200 business decision-makers in large and medium-sized enterprises in the UK, also reveals that over one-third (35%) of those organisations who’ve adopted cloud are less than 80% confident that it’s completely secure.
When questioned about security weaknesses in their companies, 45% of decision-makers agree that it’s the increasing amount of machine identities and service accounts, such as those used by servers and applications, that are becoming the largest exposure point for their organisation.
Interestingly, the study findings also reveals that more than one-in-four (28%) of those companies questioned during the survey have already been targeted by a cloud hacking attempt since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the early part of last year.
Most worryingly, despite continued requirements on enterprises for digital transformation and rapid innovation, almost one-third (31%) of business decision-makers admitted that their development teams are more interested in circumventing security rather than building it into the DevOps pipeline. This poses a potentially grim cyber security outlook for 2021.
Adapting to the pandemic
Kamel Heus, vice-president for the EMEA region at Centrify, commented: “Adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic has been a bumpy ride for many businesses and, in most cases, companies have necessarily had to adopt the public cloud in at least some capacity due to the level of scalability, availability and efficiency it provides for distributed workforces.”
Heus continued: “While the common misconception is that cloud security is quite different to that of on-premises infrastructure, it’s by no means less secure if common security protocols are followed, and security controls are applied.”
In conclusion, Heus observed: “One core challenge posed by digital transformation is accurately verifying human and machine identities before granting access to systems, applications and other high-value targets. Therefore, adopting cloud-ready privileged access management software is essential in protecting access to workloads in the public cloud by dint of granting access only when a requestor’s identity has been properly authenticated.”
TheSecurityLion 