2022's Top Cloud Security Challenges & How you can Overcome

In recent years, cloud adoption has been on the rise and there has also been a lot of cloud security challenges.. The transition has hastened partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, even while some organizations migrated way before. With remote work now becoming the norm, companies should be able to offer critical support and services to workers offsite.

As a result, some form of cloud-based infrastructure is applied by over 98% of enterprises, while about 75% use multiple cloud deployments from different providers. Critical business services are hosted in these cloud environments containing private consumer and enterprise data.

Cloud security is an essential requirement for cloud migration. Cloud-based apps need to be secured from attacks, and any data stored in the cloud must be secured from unauthorized access in compliance with applicable laws.

But because cloud environments are very different from on-premises infrastructure, conventional security strategies and tools don't necessarily function well there. As a result, many businesses have difficulty protecting their brand-new cloud infrastructure.

Cloud Security Challenges

Every year, there is a greater acceptance of the cloud, increasing cloud security's significance. Many firms quickly shifted to cloud-based infrastructure to fulfil business objectives in recent years, yet efforts to safeguard this infrastructure have lagged. Below are some of the cloud computing security issues and solutions:

Multi-Cloud Deployment Issues

Most businesses use multiple clouds in their deployment. This enables them to fully benefit from the distinctive advantages of various cloud environments tailored for particular use cases. It also increases the size and complexity of their cloud infrastructure.

The complexity of multi-cloud settings exacerbates significant multi-cloud security concerns. Among the principal difficulties multi-cloud users encounter are:

• Integration of solutions: Diverse solutions from various suppliers are used in multi-cloud setups. 50% of businesses find it challenging to comprehend how security solutions interact.
• Loss of control and visibility: The model of shared responsibility and dependence on infrastructure makes it challenging to maintain visibility and control in the cloud. This is cited by 46% of firms as a critical issue when operating in multi-cloud settings.
• Cloud skills access: 56% of businesses have difficulty acquiring the skills required to build and manage unified security across multiple cloud systems. This becomes increasingly challenging as the number of environments increases because it calls for in-depth knowledge of each environment.
• Data protection and privacy: In compliance with corporate policy and legal requirements, 57% of firms find it difficult to appropriately protect data in multi-cloud systems. Consistent defence is challenging to implement due to the diversity of built-in security rules and tools across various contexts.

Cloud Service Providers

Nearly a quarter (24%) of businesses use more than five cloud service providers, while more than seven in ten (76%) use two or more. It is challenging to consistently monitor and safeguard these cloud systems due to the complexity of the cloud infrastructure. Furthermore, more than half of businesses (54%) think that third-party vendor solutions are more effective than the built-in security options provided by their cloud providers.

The key security objectives of an organization may become difficult to achieve, such as:

• Achieving regulatory compliance: A complicated regulatory environment and a quickening pace of digital transformation make compliance difficult.
• Malware control has become a top priority in the cloud as businesses focus on the cloud and cyber threat actors follow suit.
• Preventing cloud misconfigurations: It might be difficult to ensure that all vendor-specific security settings are accurate.
• Keeping popular cloud apps secure: Due to quick migrations because of COVID-19, many security teams are still catching up.

Compliance with Cloud Standards

For most enterprises, adherence to various data privacy laws and industry standards is needed. But unlike on-premises systems, establishing and implementing compliance requirements for cloud environments is fundamentally different. The following are some of the greatest issues that enterprises have with cloud compliance:

• Changing environments: Complying with cloud regulations is a constant challenge because both regulatory requirements and cloud environments are always evolving. 43% of firms perceive maintaining continual compliance despite changes in cloud infrastructures as a challenge.
• Cloud vulnerability management: As multi-cloud infrastructure grows, so does the potential attack surface for a company. To avoid data breaches and regulatory non-compliance, it is crucial to regularly check cloud apps and services for vulnerabilities.
• Complicated audits: On-premise, where the firm owns and controls its entire infrastructure, compliance audits and risk assessments can be intimidating. Having limited access to the underlying infrastructure in the cloud is a problem that 42% of firms mentioned.
• Lack of staff knowledge and expertise: Implementing essential controls in cloud systems involves specialized knowledge and expertise, in addition to knowledge of the required controls. According to more than half (55%) of organizations, the biggest obstacle to achieving cloud compliance is a lack of knowledge of both the regulations and the cloud.
• Automation of compliance is necessary since it is difficult and impractical to manually monitor and report compliance with various rules across many cloud environments. Scaling and automating compliance is cited by 27% of firms as one of their main cloud compliance challenges.

Cycle of DevOps

By incorporating cloud security solutions into earlier phases of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), it is possible to significantly reduce the costs and effects of vulnerabilities or code that fails to adhere to regulatory compliance standards. DevOps security and compliance testing are used by organizations at many stages of the SDLC, including:

• Production and System Testing: 52%
• Unit testing and feature development: 42%
• Phase: 42%
• Test-free: 10%
• Other: 27%

Conclusion

An organization can profit significantly from cloud-based infrastructure. Outsourcing the management of a significant portion of an organization's infrastructure stack to the cloud provider offers more flexibility and scalability and the potential to lower expenses and overhead.

These advantages do not come without a price, though. Organizations moving from on-premises infrastructure to cloud-based infrastructure must include cloud installations in their current security architecture and policies. This can be difficult and create several cloud security challenges due to the considerable differences between on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure.