Are You Confident of Your Cloud Security Posture?

Cloud computing can be described as the on-demand delivery of IT services similar to that of electricity in a household with a flip of a switch! It is the ease of use, agility, and availability that makes Cloud computing a convenient and innovative solution. Multi-cloud, private cloud, and hybrid are the new normal for organizations, adding more complexity to securing enterprise customers. The pandemic has accelerated this digital transformation through increased usage of cloud, SaaS, mobile devices, and IoT.

A major consequence of the sporadic increase in the usage of Cloud services is the increase in Cyber-attacks, making security an important tenet of cloud services. Cloud security follows similar principles as that of on-prem security with the exclusion of additional costs to maintain physical devices. Companies can now shift their focus to the security tools and processes that overlook and protect the flow of information through a company’s resources. With the increase in the number of devices per person, security staff is now tasked with monitoring a much larger attack surface than ever before. In short, alerts are coming at them from everywhere and at a very high rate! The advent of IoT has led to a consistent increase in this risky industry and the attacks are expected to only double by 2025.

Given that the attacks are surging, security teams should be better prepared now than ever before. The basic course of action to resolve a security attack consists of three steps – investigate the issue, compare it against your organization’s threat intelligence to determine its validity, and decide on a course of action to finally resolve the issue. Most of the work in the realm of investigating and resolving the issue is manual and is done on potentially thousands of alerts and often with incomplete data points. With the continuous increase in the overall volume of attacks, it is practically impossible to keep up with the manual efforts. Organizations need to develop a smarter way to tackle security attacks. One of the most effective ways would be by leveraging AI and automation technologies. AI-backed solutions can learn what normal behavior looks like to identify anomalous behavior.

While most organizations leveraging the benefits of the Cloud will appreciate an automated solution to Cyber-attacks, it is important to analyze the organization’s requirement for an automated security solution. The overall increase in the incidents along with the influx of data from multiple devices can make it challenging for organizations to focus on the signs that they might need some level of automation.

Organizations focusing on improving the security structure should look for signs that indicate the need for security automation in the organization. If your organization is experiencing one or more of the following, you might need a better security solution.

Slower response to incidents. With the ever-increasing volume of data, security analysts can only investigate and respond to a fraction of the alerts that they receive. The tedious task of going through the huge volume of data only makes responding in real-time a challenge and it rarely happens.

False positives. This is a true challenge because the true result is only revealed once you investigate and dive deep. False positives ultimately result in diverting the focus of security analysts away from other important areas such as addressing real threats.

Efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Working on false positives or spending long hours on repetitive tasks greatly reduces efficiency. 

If your organization has experienced one or more of the above, you need to strengthen your security solution