Security Risks of Cloud Computing

The cloud industry is expected to reach a $250 billion milestone soon with popular cloud-based platforms such as OpenStack, Microsoft Azure, Google Storage, and Amazon leading the way. Cloud computing has reached mainstream adoption, and organizations continue to invest millions of their IT budgets in cloud initiatives.

As more enterprises focus on priorities and best practices like improving business resilience, digitizing operations, and supporting hybrid workplaces, they’ll shift more of their business processes and infrastructure to the cloud. Gartner forecasts that more than 45% of IT spending on infrastructure, software, and business process outsourcing will be reallocated from traditional to cloud solutions by 2024.

Cloud technology and its market have matured, but many organizations still overlook the security risks of cloud computing. Surprisingly, 45% of organizations have experienced an attack and 25% have experienced a breach, according to a recent SailPoint survey. A big part of the cloud security problem is the complexity of the environment. The majority of organizations rely on multiple vendors while lacking consistent security policy enforcement. To lower the risks of cloud computing, enterprises need to ensure that cloud security is part of a risk mitigation strategy.

The Varied Security Risks of Cloud Computing

The security risks of cloud computing vary slightly depending on the delivery model used, but many of the risks extend into every type of cloud solution. Taking the time to understand and evaluate these risks can help to ensure that you have the right processes and tools to mitigate them. Your cloud journey will have risks—you just need to understand them.

Data Breaches

One of the biggest security risks of cloud computing, data breaches have costly consequences for organizations of all sizes and in all industries. Data breaches occur when a security incident causes unauthorized access to critical data. In short—this results in a data leak. Cloud security issues that can be prevented cause many large, high-profile data breaches.

Data Loss

Beyond data leaks or breaches, there’s the risk of important cloud resources to be irreversibly compromised. Once the bad actor penetrates your system, they have the power to manipulate files and create damage that can’t be undone. This can also be threatened by user error within your company. If you’re not backing up your most important data, it’s always going to have some level of risk to be deleted, altered, or locked with no permissions. In the event that necessary users are locked out of a resource, you’ll waste valuable time solving the problem with your solution provider.

Insider Threats

Insiders don’t need to act maliciously to pose a security risk. Often, users create exposure by simply storing sensitive files or sharing them with outsiders via unsanctioned or unsecure cloud services. This is particularly worrisome in a BYOD environment, where the IT team often has limited visibility into devices and cloud applications. If you’re not thoughtful about your cloud governance model, you could be allowing your own employees to unwittingly put you at risk.

Excessive Entitlements and Privileges

Spinning up a new virtual machine or instance and adding containers and objects is easily done within cloud environments. However, this can lead to excessive and unused access that increases the attack surface as well as the chances of misuse. Simply put—the more permissions that exist in your cloud governance framework, the more opportunities there are for the wrong person to access the wrong things.

Poor Access Management

Many organizations adopt the cloud without a holistic strategy that extends their identity access management (IAM) program into their cloud ecosystem. The lack of an integrated solution creates visibility gaps, along with inconsistent policies and enforcement, which leads to compromised credentials and data breaches. Leveraging automation within an IAM solution takes a lot of the security effort off your plate, providing better protection while giving time back to you.

Privileged Access Management

Privileged access management, or PAM, can greatly reduce security risks with best practices such as least privilege. This practice restricts access rights based on what’s necessary to perform regular activities. Many enterprises, however, leave gaps by not implementing PAM across their on-premises and cloud ecosystem. The key is to grant permissions only when a user has an actual need for the file or application being requested—adding risk to your infrastructure with virtually no benefit.

Misconfigurations and Other Vulnerabilities

Misconfigurations such as default database settings and unsecure access keys are very common, and threat actors frequently exploit these vulnerabilities. Cybercriminals have experience breaching baseline security systems, so failing to customize your access control makes your organization an easy target. Misconfigurations are preventable because they are typically the result of human error. This is in fact, one of the most common causes of data breach.

Unreliable Networks

When you’re using a cloud service for critical business tasks, it’s imperative that you choose a solution you can rely on. Outside of cloud-time, there’s also risk in the event that your company’s internet goes down. IAM solutions can only go as far as their internet connection can take them, and every minute off your network is a minute your cloud computing system is down. Depending on the time this occurs, you could face uncomfortable conversations with customers that are forced to wait to be served.

Noncompliance

Regulatory compliance affects just about every organization. Managing security and compliance in the cloud becomes complicated due to the proliferation of cloud vendors and solutions within each organization. While cloud providers are responsible for securing their own underlying infrastructure, the secure use of that infrastructure—and the data that resides in it—still lies with the users.

Loss of Customer Trust

In the event of a data or security breach, it's your responsibility to notify all potentially victimized customers. This, of course, leads to a poor experience for customers and a lack of trust in your organization. Resources must be spent to clean up the mess and help mitigate churn from your customers. Depending on the size of your company, a PR effort might need to be deployed to deal with the fall out with your governance cloud.

Insecure APIs

Application programming interfaces, or APIs, enable the provisioning of computing resources. Threat actors exploit unsecure APIs—such as APIs that lack authentication or use unvetted open-source software—to gain access to its cloud resources. Any time you have customers triggering data transmissions from an internal source for external use, additional complications can arise. If the configuration of your API has flaws, it can lead to threats like reusable tokens, compromised passwords, or anonymous access without authentication. Ensuring your technology stacks are secure is the only way to keep cyberthieves from finding additional entry points into your infrastructure.

Summing Up Cloud Security

To protect against the security risks of cloud computing, organizations should consider adopting cloud access and entitlement management solutions that provide visibility across all cloud resources along with consistent enforcement and management of access policies. Furthermore, organizations should consider implementing a cloud governance framework that integrates their cloud access and entitlement management solutions into their overall identity management strategy. By taking this identity-centric approach to cloud governance, organizations can use their existing identity processes, workflows, signoffs, and reporting for their cloud environments, simplifying administration, enhancing security, and easing compliance.

For more information, please visit our Cloud Governance webpage.

FAQ

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing, often simply called “the cloud,” refers to an internet-based application, networking, and software solutions to deliver or access computing resources and services. Cloud services are delivered via different types of models, such as:

What are the different types of cloud computing?

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