As businesses increasingly migrate to cloud environments, the benefits are clear: scalability, flexibility and cost-efficiency. However, the cloud is a double-edged sword presenting significant security challenges that Chief Information Security Officers must navigate to protect their organisations from emerging threats.
However, it also comes with inherent risks that need to be carefully managed. As a cyber security expert, I have seen how the cloud can expose businesses to vulnerabilities beyond their control. The most common consideration is management and cloud expertise, but others can include the basics of the impact of power outages, network disruptions, hardware failures, and data breaches.
Weaknesses: 3 thoughts
Power supply is not in your hands
As the average business (unless you ARE that business) You rely on the national grid to provide uninterrupted electricity to run your cloud services. However, power outages due to natural disasters, human errors, or malicious attacks happen. Reputable data centres have backup generators and redundancy measures, so implementing a hybrid cloud strategy ensures that a prolonged or widespread power outage will not affect your cloud operations.
Connectivity is not guaranteed
You depend on the internet to access your cloud services and data. However, the internet can be affected by various factors, such as congestion, routing issues, cyberattacks, or censorship. If your internet connection is slow, unstable, or blocked, you may not be able to use your cloud services or access your data.
Hardware not under your supervision
You trust the data centre to maintain and secure the physical servers, storage devices, and network equipment that host your cloud services and data. However, hardware can fail unexpectedly, due to wear and tear, overheating, or sabotage. If the hardware that supports your cloud services or stores your data is damaged or compromised, you may face a loss of service or data.
The main challenges for CISOs in securing the cloud
As a CISO, you are responsible for ensuring the security and compliance of your cloud infrastructure. However, this is not an easy task, as you face several challenges. One of the main challenges is to have visibility of the risk across your cloud estate and to report on the compliance status. You need to monitor and audit your cloud services and data, and to ensure that they adhere to the relevant standards, regulations, and policies. However, this can be difficult, as cloud environments are dynamic, complex, and heterogeneous.
Another challenge for CISOs is to keep control of the data flows and security status of systems. You need to protect your data from unauthorised access, modification, or leakage, and to ensure that your systems are updated and patched. However, this can be challenging, as cloud tenants have many ways to share and collaborate with data, but this also opens up problems for controlling the data leaks. Data loss prevention is a good example of reducing the risk, but it is only as good as the person writing the rules to detect the data.
Ben Large is a Security Consultant for Ultima Business Solutions who is a leading AI-powered IT Solutions and Managed Services Provider for organisations across the private and public sectors in the UK.
