Since March 2020, cloud adoption has accelerated at an unprecedented rate and across every industry. With the pandemic ushering in the work-from-home era, the ability of organizations to collaborate remotely has become paramount, placing a higher-than-ever premium on cloud technology.

It's that time of year again when ghouls, creeps, ghosts, and goblins take to the streets and scare the living daylights out of regular, everyday folk. None of these monsters compare to something much scarier, much more heinous–hackers! Cybercriminals don't wait until October to wreak havoc on the living, they do it every day, and their cyberattacks become bolder with each passing year. It's difficult to fathom how many cyberattacks actually happen.

The adoption of cloud software in organizations continues to grow. In 2020, the combined end-user spending on cloud services totaled $270 billion, according to Gartner. By 2022, projections indicate that this total will rise to a staggering $397.5 billion. In fact, according to Arcserve, there will be over 100 zettabytes of data stored in the cloud by 2025. To give you some perspective, a zettabyte is equivalent to a billion terabytes. But are cloud services superior to an on-premises solution?

As enterprises move their applications to the cloud, they’re adopting finer-grained authorization for their users in order to better secure architectures and applications. Today, many, if not most, organizations use a role-based access control (RBAC) model for secure access. But as the push for fine-grained control grows, many organizations are asking: should we transition to attribute-based access control (ABAC)?

Despite the increase in cloud adoption, many organizations are still hesitant to move their confidential and highly sensitive data to the cloud. It’s not uncommon for companies to have concerns about being able to maintain the privacy, integrity, and security of their data when they migrate to the cloud or leverage cloud services. This is especially true for organizations that operate in highly regulated industries, such as healthcare, financial services, insurance, and the public sector.

Architecturally speaking, cloud-native applications are broken down into smaller components that are highly dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral. Because each of these components is communicating with other components inside or outside the cluster, this architecture introduces new attack vectors that are difficult to protect against using a traditional perimeter-based approach.

In our previous blog breaking down The 5 Fundamentals of Cloud Security, we looked at the value of prevention and secure design. Mapping resource relationships and enforcing security guardrails throughout development helps greatly reduce an available attack surface. But who will enforce these guardrails when your security team is busy with other work? This should be where developers are able to step in. So let’s look at another vital element in cloud security: empowering developers.

Organizations are rapidly migrating their infrastructure to the cloud, enabling them to modernize their applications and deliver more value to their customers. But this transition creates significant security risks that they may be unable to keep pace with. For example, cyber attacks on cloud resources are becoming more sophisticated and prevalent. Additionally, organizations often rely on legacy, disjointed security tools that don’t integrate well with cloud-native infrastructure.