The cloud is king. 94% of organizations rely on the public cloud in some capacity, and 84% have a “multi-cloud” strategy. The rise of hybrid and remote work, the proliferation of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and the general digitization of once analog industries has turned the cloud into a “must-have,” especially with its pricing, space, and ability to be accessed from anywhere. But with new technologies comes new threats.

With the continued move to the cloud, cloud detection and response helps security teams defend their cloud applications and infrastructure.

Many organizations have either been formed in, or have migrated to cloud-based environments due to the efficiency, flexibility, mobility, cost savings, and other benefits. The majority of applications that are used today are incorporated with the cloud. Most of our data and processes exist in the cloud. But simple as it is, just uploading your files to the cloud or using services of the cloud, doesn`t guarantee that it`s secure.

Each day, enterprise and public sector IT teams face new challenges when managing hybrid work for networks of hundreds, or even thousands, of users. A more distributed workforce means an increased reliance on collaboration and productivity tools. It also requires a strong strategy to protect these systems against vulnerabilities and modern cyberattacks.

You should consider the following tips, tricks and best practices to help improve your supply chain security in the cloud. The cloud has revolutionized the way businesses operate, providing a scalable and cost-effective solution for storing, processing, and sharing data. However, with this growth has come new security concerns, particularly around the cloud software supply chain.

Forensic investigators must understand how to navigate challenges to successfully uncover digital evidence in the cloud. By following best practices and utilizing the latest tools and techniques, organizations can be better prepared to investigate cyber threats and mitigate risks.

Google Drive continues to be one of the most abused cloud services by threat actors, and the latest edition (April 2023) of the Threat Horizons Report, released by security researchers in Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG), shows more interesting examples of how opportunistic and state-sponsored threat actors are exploiting its flagship cloud storage service, to conduct malicious campaigns (and by the way, Netskope Cloud and Threat Report is quoted in the report).

Today I’m excited to share the latest milestone in our growing partner ecosystem: Vanta has joined the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Accelerate Program. ‍ The AWS ISV Accelerate Program is a co-sell program for AWS Partners who provide software solutions that run on or integrate with AWS. Vanta’s acceptance into the program enables us to work in close collaboration with the AWS sales team to meet customer needs and provide better outcomes. ‍

When you buy a new house, you shouldn’t have to worry that everyone in the city can unlock your front door with a universal key before you change the lock. You also shouldn’t have to walk around the house with a screwdriver and tighten the window locks and back door so that intruders can’t pry them open.

Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) that offers a cloud-based version of its popular software productivity suite, including MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote. In contrast, Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) that offers a cloud-based version of Active Directory to control identity management and access to virtual resources across an organization.

AWS Verified Access (AVA), a feature of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networking, delivers secure, zero-trust access to private applications without a VPN by continuously evaluating each request in real time based on contextual security signals like identity, device security status and location. The service grants access based on the security policy configured for each application and then connects the users, thereby improving the security posture of the organization.

We’re delighted to announce that Mend.io has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Security Competency status. This designation recognizes that Mend.io has demonstrated proven technology and deep expertise to help customers achieve cloud security goals. It reinforces Mend.io’s position as a trusted member of the AWS Partner Network (APN), which has already been established since we achieved AWS DevOps Competency status.

There’s a scene in the original “Matrix” movie when Neo is sitting in the grimy kitchen with the rest of the crew and eating gray, runny slop. No matter what new version of gray slop they eat, they always seem to think that it tastes like chicken. When confronted with something new, it’s a natural human trait to relate it back to something we already know.

The use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in organizations around the world is prolific. The platform accounted for 31% of total cloud infrastructure services spend in Q2 2022, growing by 33% annually. Despite its widespread use, many organizations still fail to consider the nuances of incident response in AWS.

The cloud has revolutionized the way we do business. It has made it possible for us to store and access data from anywhere in the world, and it has also made it possible for us to scale our businesses up or down as needed. However, the cloud also brings with it new challenges. One of the biggest challenges is just keeping track of all of the data that is stored in the cloud. This can make it difficult to identify and respond to security incidents.

In the past year, we’ve shifted our infrastructure from a single Amazon Web Services (AWS) account owned by our Platform team to multiple domain-specific accounts. For each product domain and environment, we have created AWS accounts, which has allowed us to improve stability and security by reducing the blast radius. This setup also provides excellent scalability with good cost observability across the organization.

Gartner has recognized Cloudflare in the 2023 “Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge (SSE)” report for its ability to execute and completeness of vision. We are excited to share that the Cloudflare Zero Trust solution, part of our Cloudflare One platform, is one of only ten vendors recognized in the report. Of the 10 companies named to this year’s Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ report, Cloudflare is the only new vendor addition.

Digital transformation isn’t only for the good guys. Adversaries are undergoing their own digital transformation to exploit modern IT infrastructures — a trend we’re seeing play out in real time as they increasingly adapt their knowledge and tradecraft to exploit cloud environments. According to the CrowdStrike 2023 Global Threat Report, observed cloud exploitation cases grew by 95% over the previous year.

With ever-increasing application architecture complexity, infrastructure-as-code is your key to boosting your cloud security posture.

Editor’s note: This is the final part of a five-part cloud security series that covers protecting an organization’s network perimeter, endpoints, application code, sensitive data, and service and user accounts from threats. So far in this series, we’ve looked at the importance of securing an organization’s network, its application components, the endpoints that support those components, and its application data.

For organizations in highly regulated industries, any misconfiguration in their cloud environments can be detrimental to customer trust and privacy if overlooked. To mitigate this risk, DevOps and security engineers follow recognized compliance standards to quickly surface issues in their AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud environments. Organizations can take this work a step further by developing detection rules tailored to their unique business or security goals.

With deep integrations into Google Workspace, Egnyte enables users to streamline the document creation process by delivering a seamless experience to create, co-edit and share documents directly from within the Egnyte Desktop App and Web UI. By using Egnyte as the document source, files are also protected from internal misuse and external threats, ensuring that users can collaborate with confidence, without concerns of exposing sensitive data.

It's no surprise that organizations are moving to the cloud to innovate — to meet the growing demands of their customers and digital transformation. Organizations want to build applications that are fast and scalable. They want to make use of the latest cloud-native capabilities like containers, orchestrators, microservices, APIs, and declarative infrastructure. However, this also means security in the cloud cannot be an afterthought.

Digital and cloud transformation has unlocked new business opportunities and operational efficiencies for organisations. But migration to the cloud also means our approach to deploying applications and services has radically changed, as enterprises move away from traditional data centres. Likewise, flexible working means users have also moved away from traditional offices and branches.

In July 2022, we announced Snyk Cloud, extending the Snyk developer security platform to secure application and infrastructure configurations in running cloud environments. Today, we’re thrilled to introduce a new feature of Snyk Cloud that enables you to "fix cloud issues in IaC" (infrastructure as code), making Snyk Cloud the first solution to secure the cloud through code with remediation paths in IaC.

Amazon Security Lake automatically centralizes an organization’s security data from cloud, on-premises, and custom sources it into a purpose-built data lake stored in a customer’s AWS account. Amazon Security Lake reduces the complexity and costs for customers to make their security solutions data accessible to address a variety of security use cases such as threat detection, investigation, and incident response.

Over its history Netskope has delivered many tools to integrate its various solutions and findings with Microsoft products. We have built multiple integrations with Azure Active Directory, Azure Sentinel, Azure Monitor, and Azure Blob and Compute. All of these are very helpful in unlocking base or advanced functionality to augment Microsoft solutions.

The efficiency, security, and scalability of cloud operations are driving financial institutions’ adoption of the technology faster than ever before. The ability to meet customers where they want to transact, personalize solutions, and leverage new data and analytics solutions (including AI) on-demand is driving this growth. In fact, according to Accenture, the banking industry's workloads in the cloud more than doubled from 2021 to 2022.

Cloud computing has made its way to organizations’ IT infrastructure strategy rapidly over the past few years. In particular, Canadian businesses are showing an increased adoption. This article decodes how Canada’s IT infrastructure shaped up in the last decade, why data sovereignty is now a hot topic, and what the future holds for the cloud. While on-premises IT infrastructure continues to be relevant even today, both SMBs and enterprises are now embracing the cloud more than ever.

Snyk recently hosted a half-day virtual event focused on security for application workloads running on AWS (you can catch it on demand here). The event was broken into six sessions spanning topics like developer challenges in cloud-native AppDev, top vulnerabilities from last year, hands-on workshops with industry-leading technology vendors, and several other subjects that help enable engineering and security teams to build a successful DevSecOps workflow.