Guardians of the Cloud: The Latest Security Findings

By Juan Lugo from Bitglass

With the emergence of cloud adoption and BYOD in the workplace, companies are experiencing an overwhelming amount of data breaches. This is largely because they are not taking the appropriate steps to secure data in the cloud. As such, Bitglass conducted a survey with IT professionals from a leading cybersecurity community in order to uncover the state of security within organizations today.

The results showed that the top three security priorities in the average enterprise are defending against malware, reaching regulatory compliance, and securing major apps in use. Additionally, 85% of companies now enable bring your own device (BYOD), which is alarming given the fact that securing mobile devices is second to last on organizations’ leading cloud priorities.

Security in the Cloud

In the last four years, there has been a significant increase in how much organizations trust the security of public cloud apps relative to on-premises apps. In 2015, only 40% of IT professionals stated that they believe public cloud apps are as secure or more secure than on-premises apps; in this new survey, the number was 67%.

Organizations are adopting cloud-based solutions for their businesses at a rapid rate. They are storing corporate emails (63% of respondents), customer data (45% of respondents) and intellectual property (24% of respondents) in the cloud. This exhibits the need for a cutting-edge cloud access security broker (CASB).

Visibility & Oversight

In 2019, most companies still lack full oversight and control after initial authentication (or login). This is likely due to factors like the rise of BYOD and the challenges that they create for organizations trying to maintain visibility over their data. Fortunately, CASBs like Bitglass can provide visibility and control in an agentless architecture that is perfect for securing BYOD environments and addressing evolving threats.

Defenses Against Malware

Defending against malware can be a difficult process for organizations that are deciding whether or not they want to allow their employees to access corporate data from personal devices. While enabling BYOD provides enhanced productivity and efficiency, it can give malware more attack vectors that it can use to infiltrate the enterprise. As such, organizations must select cloud security tools that secure data access from any device in real time, and block zero-day malware at upload, at download, and at rest – without any agents.

Cloud Security Provider

Ironically, the biggest factor that firms are concerned about when it comes to choosing a cloud security provider is cost. However, the costs that ensue after a data leak or breach are far larger than the price of investing in a reliable CASB.

Want to read more about our cloud security survey? Download the full report here.