Why it’s time to disrupt cybersecurity solutions amid the cloud era
Agent-based security solutions are ineffective in cloud environments, hampering businesses trying to leverage technology to drive growth.
Businesses are racing ahead with digital transformation, but their cybersecurity capabilities are often lagging behind. Enterprises won’t be able to fully exploit new cloud architectures and applications unless their security teams undergo their own transformation.
Cloud is now an essential component of a comprehensive enterprise strategy. In EU countries, 41% of all enterprises used cloud computing services in 2021, according to a Eurostat report, with Sweden and Finland leading the way at 75%. Meanwhile, the UK’s cloud spending rate has been forecasted to reach 11.5% of total IT spending this year.
But security teams are finding it hard to properly oversee these cloud environments.
These teams need frictionless visibility into their entire cloud infrastructure so they can prioritise real risks over the white noise produced by most security solutions. Security staff also need to enforce shared responsibility for security across the organisation and with cloud providers.
Solutions gap
Cloud demonstrably provides organisations with the ability to instantly use the best technology that is available in the market, hence the rapid adoption of infrastructure-as-a-service, software-as-a-service, and platform-as-a-service.
But security teams have lacked the revolutionary solutions needed in this ever-changing environment.
Most security solutions represent a legacy mentality based on installing software agents at every endpoint in an ever-expanding environment. Typically, security solutions represent a conglomeration of technologies developed reactively over time for separate domains, such as mainframes, PCs, internet, and mobile.
Even cloud-based security solutions largely represent patchworks of different tooling intended for different needs, and largely running independently of each other. The result is that security teams are overwhelmed by a bewildering blizzard of often inconsequential alerts that serve to mask the truly consequential risks that they should be focused on.
According to Wiz research, over 55% of companies have at-least one database that is currently publicly exposed to the internet, and 82% of companies provide third-party vendors with highly privileged roles that most security teams are unaware of.
This limited visibility undermines adoption of new technologies and frustrates efforts to ensure compliance. CSOs and CISOs understandably have become hesitant in allowing businesses to quickly adopt new cloud-based services. In essence, security has become a drag on efforts to quickly respond to new opportunities and challenges, when it should be an enabler.
How to enable security in the cloud era
Cloud-native security technology can deliver unified coverage across clouds and compute architectures from virtual machines and containers to serverless functions. It can provide shared responsibility for security from application developers to infrastructure administrators to cloud providers.
With this shared responsibility, organisations can empower developers to recognise and fix security issues as they become apparent, rather than waiting for CSOs and CISOs to react with new policies after the damage has already occurred.
Without reliance on traditional software agents, the Wiz security solution can deploy quickly, at scale and without friction. Wiz builds an inventory of your cloud infrastructure — across workloads, accounts, and environments. This disruptive security technology provides the capabilities needed to transform reactive security practices into proactive strategies to identify and reduce cyber risk. Our clients can see, and are able to correlate, security risks across multiple clouds and multiple application architectures.
The Wiz Research team has compiled a report of the most pressing cloud risks to expect in 2022, and how you can protect against them.