AlgoSec survey highlights hurdles enterprises face moving to the cloud
Although interest in the public cloud continues to grow, security issues are hindering organizations from embracing the platform, stymieing widespread adoption in return. That is the conclusion of a recent survey by AlgoSec titled “Hybrid Cloud Environments: The State of Security,” which investigated the hybrid cloud security strategies of organizations.
AlgoSec surveyed 450 C-level executives and senior security and networking professionals conducting the report. The authors of the report found that while many companies are embracing and intend to increase their public cloud adoption, several organizations expressed major security concerns about managing security across hybrid environments, both before and after migration.
Among the survey’s key findings, 58% of respondents cited cyberattacks and 53% cited unauthorized access as their greatest concern about their applications in the cloud. Other concerns expressed included application outages and misconfigured security controls. Almost 40% of respondents said security was thwarting further adoption of cloud platforms.
According the survey, the biggest security management challenges companies face in a hybrid environment are a lack of visibility at 63% and managing policies consistently at 61%. Moreover, before migrating to the cloud, 32% of respondents said they had challenges mapping application traffic flows. After migrating to the cloud, 44% of respondents said they had a hard time managing security policies and 30% said their applications did not work.
“Migrating applications is a complex, tedious and error-prone process that requires detailed preparation if it is to proceed smoothly without compromising security, compliance and business agility,” wrote the authors of the report. “Understanding and mapping existing application connectivity flows for complex enterprise applications premigration — which is critical in order to re-establish the correct traffic flows following migration — is extremely difficult. There is usually little to no up-to-date documentation on existing application connectivity and it can take months to gather the necessary information, understand the requirements and then painstakingly adjust and migrate every firewall rule, router ACL and cloud security group to the new environment. A single mistake can cause outages, compliance violations and create holes in the security perimeter.”
The survey also found that companies are increasingly adopting a multi-cloud approach leveraging multiple cloud vendors to manage their infrastructure. Approximately 58% of respondents said they used Microsoft Azure as their cloud platform, following Amazon Web Services (AWS) at 52%, Google Cloud at 19%, Oracle Cloud at 9% and RackSpace at 7.3%.
In addressing the hurdles companies cited along their journey to the cloud, the authors of the report advised enterprises to get a security management solution that provides holistic visibility, automate security responses, map prior to migrating, and to link cyber attacks to impacted applications for a faster transition.
