If your enterprise is like most of Forward Networks’ customers, then your IT shop oversees a sizable cloud estate. You probably have hundreds of accounts, projects, or subscriptions across different cloud vendors. There are tons of related objects too — virtual machines, firewalls, transit gateways, subnets, and more. And cloud-native apps? Maybe you hundreds of those in use or development as well.

Here in the United States, we often focus on the cybersecurity readiness of the federal government. The reality is that state and local government departments are just as, if not more vulnerable to cyber attacks. Nearly one quarter of their employees use personal devices for work, where security teams have little visibility, enabling threat actors to execute phishing and other malicious activities. These risks will only continue to grow as in-person services continue remotely.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) has taken over the world because it’s easy. With just a few clicks, business units can find an application that’s suitable for a particular business process. They can subscribe to it and immediately start using it — and the IT department might never find out.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) apps have become essential to how most of us run our organizations and stay productive — especially over the last two years. On any given day, you’re likely messaging colleagues using Slack or Teams, sharing files with partners from Google Drive or Microsoft SharePoint, or working in Workday or Salesforce to perform an HR- or sales-related business process.

The federal government continues to make progress towards Zero Trust (ZT) adoption. On May 12, 2021, President Biden signed Executive Order 14028 to improve the nation’s cybersecurity and protect federal government networks and on January 26, 2022, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a Federal strategy to move the U.S. Government toward a Zero Trust approach to cybersecurity.

Recently, we have been facing a recurring problem related to cloud security – breaches based on credentials leak or breakage. Users tend to log into their accounts using a single factor system, such as a user and password combination. This introduces a single point of failure in your account’s security. Weeks ago, we read a tweet about a person dealing with a huge AWS bill due to a stolen key that was taken by attackers to use AWS Lambda functions for crypto mining.

The PCI certification process is quite comprehensive and relates to infrastructure, software and employee access to systems, in particular to datasets and the way that they are accessed. These checks are critical not only to the wider payments industry but also to create a level of trust with users knowing their data is protected. The PCI compliance process is a number of checks, usually by an accredited third party, to ensure that secure data handling processes are in place.

We are proud to announce that we have recently achieved AWS Security Competency Partner status. This status exemplifies our technical expertise and dedication to helping customers secure their software at every stage of cloud adoption.