How Cloud Anarchy Leads to Insecurity

How Cloud Anarchy Leads to Insecurity

The Issue of “Overclouding”

The scope of some cities in Asia boggles the mind. There are places in China you never heard of that are already bigger than Los Angeles, New York, or London. Seoul, Manila, Shanghai, and Delhi all have at least 25 million people in their metropolitan sphere. Tokyo metro is up to more than 37 million. Jakarta and Delhi are rapidly catching up. One of them may soon take over as the largest urban center in the world.

There are a great many advantages to urban living. Everything is close to hand, labor is available, and economies of scale can be generated. But if you have ever driven in any of these Asian cities or in LA, New York, Houston, or London for that matter, you will have been shocked by the volume of traffic. These cities are crowded. Commutes are long. Freeways are jammed. Gridlock is the norm. Crime tends to soar in dense urban settings.

The cloud is heading in a similar direction. Laura DiDio, an IT and security analyst at ITIC, notes that that the cloud is getting crowded. Public and hybrid cloud markets are hotter and more competitive than ever. 2022 will see $1.3 trillion in cloud spending, rising to $1.8 trillion by 2025 according to Gartner, outpacing non-cloud IT spending. DiDio predicts that hybrid cloud adoption will accelerate in the coming years. Thus, IT systems will continue to be split between internal and increasingly dispersed external cloud components.

The Issue of IT Security

That poses a big problem of security. ITIC’s 2022 Global Server Hardware Security survey found that businesses suffered an 84% surge in security incidents like ransomware, email phishing scams, and targeted data breaches over the last two years. Each successful breach has a financial cost of $4.24 million, according to the Ponemon Institute. The price tag has risen by 20% in the past two years. The problem has only gotten worse as organizations deploy more cloud services across multiple clouds and as they try to support a vast network of mobile and work-from-home employees.

Overclouding Multiplies Risk

More than half of all business malware is aimed at work-from-home employees using cloud applications. Like a modern, rapidly expanding and gridlocked city, “overclouding” greatly increases the risk of a security incident.

Inside many enterprises, IT struggles to stay on top of the scope and extent of the organization’s overall cloud footprint. Never mind staying in control; some IT departments have no idea how many cloud applications are being run from various parts of the enterprise.

With cloud apps being so accessible and traditional IT procurement practices being so time consuming, cumbersome, and bogged down in red tape, line of business heads have been taking matters into their own hands. They are signing up for SaaS, and other as-a-Service options in record numbers. This is a nightmare for security vendors. How can you track, monitor, and safeguard systems and applications if you are not even aware they are running, and don’t know on how many devices?

Relieving City Congestion

Massively congested cities like Jakarta and Cairo have come up with a novel solution to the overcrowding problem. They are building new capital cities. Egypt, for example, is close to completing its new administrative capital about 45 km east of Cairo to ease congestion and make it easier to conduct the business of government. Traffic was so bad that government meetings often failed to materialize. The new capital should solve that problem and make the administration of government smoother.

IT doesn’t have that option. Until a new, wholly secure internet is invented, security issues are a fact of life. Risk and threat lurk in every email, webpage, or connection to the cloud. The best approach is to up your security game.

The Syxsense Advantage

Syxsense Enterprise is the world’s first IT management and Unified Security and Endpoint Management (USEM) solution that delivers real-time vulnerability monitoring and instant remediation for every single endpoint in your environment. This represents the future of threat prevention.

Breaches can now be detected and remediated within one endpoint solution. It can scan for all vulnerabilities on any device, block communication from an infected device to the internet, isolate endpoints, and kill malicious processes before they spread. It can automatically prioritize and deploy OS and third-party patches to all major operating systems, as well as Windows 10 feature updates.

IT and security teams can use Syxsense Enterprise to collaborate on the detection and closing of attack vectors. It offers management, control, and security for any and all desktops, laptops, servers, virtual machines, and mobile devices.