More Than Half Singaporean Businesses Say Cloud Breach Would Halt Operations
Today Illumio released research findings from the Cloud Security Index: Redefine Cloud Security with Zero Trust Segmentation, which found that more than half of IT and security leaders in Singapore believe a cloud breach would make normal operations impossible in their organisations. The study also showed that almost all Singaporean organisations (95%) cite improving cloud security will be a key priority over the next year.
“The goal of cyberattacks has shifted from monetising data to impacting business operations and, as a result, the cloud has become a prime target for attack. Yet, more than half of Singaporean businesses say they wouldn’t be able to operate in the event of a cloud breach, which is concerning. Organisations need to ensure that their infrastructure is attack-tolerant, particularly as cloud usage increases. Attackers can’t paralyse critical operations without spreading across a network first – so breach containment and preventing lateral movement has to be the priority,” comments Andrew Kay, Director Systems Engineering APJ, Illumio.
Attackers Moving Freely Inside IT Environments
In many cases, threat actors target the weakest link in an IT network in order to ‘break in’ and then move laterally. Lateral movement allows hackers to move deeper into a system to target the most sensitive data and high-value assets.
In the event of a cloud breach, more than one quarter (26%) of Singaporean IT and security leaders say it would be easy for an attacker to find weaknesses in their organisations’ environment and move laterally, as they have limited or no controls in place to limit network discovery or lateral movement or have a limited amount of preventative and detective controls. Meanwhile, just one-third (35%) are confident they have excellent preventative controls in place, making it very difficult for attackers to find vulnerabilities.
Traditional Security Tools Slow Cloud Adoption and Innovation
Cloud technology affords organisations the ability to scale and innovate. However traditional security tools are holding Singaporean businesses back in both respects. Almost all (96%) of organisations in Singapore believe they need security that better scales with the speed of cloud adoption. Three-quarters (74%) of IT and security decision-makers also believe the security function slows down cloud adoption in their organisation.
Gaping Disconnect Between Singapore’s Security and Developers Remains
Security and development teams are on the frontlines when it comes to curbing the repercussions of cloud breaches. However, the Illumio research shows that much work is needed to best equip them for success. Nearly half (48%) of local respondents said their business needs to improve collaboration between security and application developers. Almost all (99%) IT and security decision-makers in Singapore believe they need to make it easier for DevOps teams to adopt cloud security best practices, and a similar number (91%) believe reducing workloads and increasing efficiency for SecOps teams needs improvement.
Read the full Cloud Security Index: Redefine Cloud Security with Zero Trust Segmentation here.
