Gartner forecasts that worldwide public cloud end-user spending will grow 23% to USD 332.3 billion in 2021 as cloud technologies become mainstream. As cloud computing architectures continue to become more prevalent, “cloud native” has become a popular buzzword. But what exactly does “cloud native” mean and what impact does it have on security? How exactly do you secure all these cloud native applications?
The Financial Times hosted an excellent event recently, at which I joined Naina Bhattacharya, CISO for Danone; Manish Chandela, Group CISO for Unipart and Florence Mottay, Global CISO for Ahold Delhaize, to discuss cloud security. The FT’s Dan Thomas moderated and the panellists all shared some excellent and candid insights into cloud threats and security strategies within their organisations.
Another memo, another leaky cloud app compromising the personal information of hundreds of thousands of individuals (and yes, you can easily guess the app that exposed the data so no spoiler alert needed—it was an S3 bucket). The latest organization to join the long list of victims of cloud misconfigurations is Cosmolog Kozmetik, a popular Turkish online retailer that exposed more than 9,500 files, totaling nearly 20 GB of data.
We talked about IAM in the past 3 posts, identities in IAM, manage users privilege as an IT person and control privilege boundaries. We also talked about how applications use AWS Cognito Identity Pool to get AWS temporary credentials to access AWS resources in early posts of “What I wish I could have learned before starting using AWS Cognito” and “Authentication and authorization with AWS Amplify under the hood”.
In this post, I’ll answer one question: Have we reached the tipping point for cloud proliferation? According to the report, the answer is yes. ESG surveyed 500 IT and security professionals working in the security operations center (SOC) chain of command at organizations with more than 1,000 employees in North America and Western Europe in Q1 of this year.
If our friends Security and Networking were on Facebook, they would probably both list their relationship status as “It’s Complicated.” Sometimes everything’s great, but now and then things can get a little weird, unclear, or uncomfortable. At many organizations, there has traditionally been a barrier between the security and networking teams. Each team has its own objectives — and at times, those objectives can be at cross-purposes.
Most organizations have already begun their shift to the cloud. In its Cloud Computing Survey 2020, for instance, International Data Group (IDG) found that 81% of respondents had at least one workload or segment of their computing infrastructure in the cloud. That percentage could grow by the end of the year, as IDG found that 32% of total IT budgets will go to cloud computing—up from 30% in 2018.
To say that the past year presented its fair share of cybersecurity challenges to the InfoSec community would be a drastic understatement. The rapid migration to remote work at scale left 80% of CIOs unprepared, and SecOps teams struggled to confront the evolving threat landscape with disparate toolkits and skill sets. Not to mention that as more organizations shifted to hybrid and multi-cloud environments at scale, cloud complexity (and cloud-based threats) skyrocketed.
