Covid-19 and the Cloud

As part of their efforts to control the spread of Covid-19, organisations across the globe are continuing to work from home. With most enterprises operating virtually and cloud playing a major role in their business continuity plans, the investment on cloud infrastructure has reportedly seen a 37% increase over a period of 3 months. With this growing use of cloud infrastructure, the threat of cloud security breaches will also rise. One of the biggest challenge that enterprises in the cloud face is “what do we secure?”. Unless there is complete visibility into all the assets and resources in the cloud, it is nearly impossible to secure the cloud.

With majority of the cloud engineering teams working from home, there is a growing concern of security vulnerabilities that will arise as a result of new access policies and the networks and devices used by these teams. Further, there is also a question of what to put into the cloud and the concern of accessibility of secure data. With rampant cloud adoption, enterprises face the following challenges:

The challenge of cloud misconfiguration and the lack of complete visibility into cloud infrastructure remains the top two challenges faced by organisations in the cloud. The problem of cloud misconfiguration can also be a result of lack of proper training, absence of a birds eye view into the cloud infrastructure, and human error (advertent or inadvertent).

The best approach to ensure seamless and effective cloud journey and security is to leverage automation. While cloud is important for the success of an organisation, the ability to operate securely in the cloud is more important. Digitisation, cloud adoption, and security must go hand in hand. With proper systems and processes the benefits of cloud adoption can be leveraged while ensuring complete cloud security and control.