Is the Cloud Moving Too Fast for Security?

By Doug Lane, Vice President/Product Marketing, Vaultive

In February 2017, a vulnerability in Slack was discovered which had the potential to expose the data of the company’s reported four million daily active users. Another breach in February on CloudFlare, a content delivery network, leaked sensitive customer data stored by millions of websites powered by the company. On March 7, the Wikileaks CIA Vault 7 exposed 8,761 documents on alleged agency hacking operations. On June 19, Deep Root Analytics, a conservative data firm, misconfigured an Amazon S3 Server that housed information on 198 million U.S. voters. On July 12, Verizon had the same issue and announced a misconfigured Amazon S3 data repository at a third-party vendor that exposed the data of more than 14 million U.S. customers.

That’s at least five-major cloud application and infrastructure data breach incidents for 2017, and we’re only in July. Add in the number of ransomeware and other attacks during the first half of this year and it’s clear the cloud has a real security problem.

By now, most everyone recognizes the benefits of the cloud; bringing new applications and infrastructure online quickly and scaling it to meet ever changing business demands. Although highly valuable for the business side, when security teams lose control over how and where new services are implemented, the network is at risk and subsequently, so is their data. The balance of allowing businesses to move at the speed of the cloud and maintain the needed security controls is becoming increasingly difficult. With the spike in data exposures and breaches, it shows that security teams are struggling to secure cloud use.

The Slack breach is a great example at the application-level. Slack is simple to use and implement, which has driven the application’s record-breaking growth. Departments, teams, and small groups can easily spin up Slack without IT approval or support, and instances of the application can spread quickly across an organization. Although Slack patched the vulnerability identified in February before any known exposure occurred, if it were hacked, the attacker could have had full access and control over four million user accounts.

In the Verizon situation, a lack of control at the infrastructure level is what caused so many of their customers to be exposed this month. When servers can be brought online so easily and configured remotely by third-party partners, the right security protocols can be missed or ignored.

As more businesses move to the cloud and as cloud services continue to grow, organizations must establish a unified set of cloud security and governance controls for business-critical SaaS applications and IaaS resources. In most cases, cloud providers will have stronger security than any individual company can maintain and manage on-premise. However, each new service comes with it’s own security capabilities, which can increase risks because of feature gaps or human error during configuration. Adding additional encryption and policy controls independently of the vendor, is a proven way for organizations to fully entrust their data to a cloud provider without giving up complete control over who can access it while also making sure employees are compliant when using SaaS applications. These controls allow businesses to move at the speed of the cloud without placing their data at risk.

The reality is that threats are increasing in frequency and severity. The people behind attacks are far more sophisticated and their intentions far more sinister. We, as individuals and businesses, entrust a mind-boggling amount of data to the cloud but there doesn’t exist today a way to entirely prevent hackers from getting through the door at the service, infrastructure or software provider. Remaining in control of your data that traverses all the cloud services that you use is the safest thing you can do to protect your business. Because, in the end, if they can’t read it or use it, is data really data?