According to recent research reported by Centrify, a leading provider of PAM solutions based on zero-trust principles, 58% of UK businesses are worried about the security of public clouds. The business decision makers say that security concerns are the main thing preventing them from adopting public cloud technology into their organisation on a significant scale.
The research was conducted through an independent polling agency (Censuswide) who used a survey over 200 business experts and decision makers from mid and large-sized enterprises throughout the UK. The study also found that 35% of organisations who have moved to cloud are less than 80% convinced that it’s fully secured and safe.
Is Security Still a Problem for Public Cloud?
When asked about the security weaknesses that their companies might have, around 45% of decision makers said that the increasing amount of machine identities combined with various service accounts could be the major problem. This includes service accounts used by applications and servers, which can be an exposure point for modern companies.
Interestingly, the study also showed that around 28% of companies can already say they’ve been targeted by a cloud hacking attempt since the COVID pandemic began in 2020. Worryingly, despite updated requirements for enterprises to digitally transform and innovate, 31% of companies said that their development terms are more interested in avoiding security concerns, than building security into the DevOps strategy.
The VP of EMEA for Centrify, Kamel Heus, said that adapting to the pandemic has been a problematic and confusing process for a lot of companies, and many have had to adopt the public cloud due to the level of scalability, efficiency, and availability provided to distributed workforces.
Keeping the Cloud Secure
While the common concern is that cloud security is very different to on-premises security, it’s not actually less secure to be on the cloud when the right distributed workforce strategies are followed, according to Centrify.
A major challenge posed by the development of digital transformation requirements is making sure that your business can accurately verify machine and human identity. This ensures that the wrong people and things aren’t given access to systems and applications that could be high-value targets. Adopting access management technology that’s ready for the cloud should be an important first step for many business leaders using workloads in the public cloud.
