Cloud adoption & common security challenges
Industries are adopting cloud for various benefits. Some of the key driving factors are:
- Healthcare industry wants electronic health records securely stored and accessible to authorized users anywhere, on any device. It also wants to meet industry regulatory compliances like HIPAA, GDPR.
- Retail industry wants to maximize their consumer experience and high availability; AI/ML powered analytics are critical to deliver immersive online service experiences.
- Banking, Securities and Insurance industries need to meet various compliances by regulatory authorities. At the same time, their consumers are demanding more availability, flexibility and intuitiveness in their services.
Cloud benefits are being realized everywhere today. However, it also brings some security challenges to enterprises: they have to protect their “crown jewels” data from various sophisticated advanced threats.
As per an old school of thought, cloud is insecure, and on-premise-centric solutions are cheaper. This is far from the truth: comprehensive threat visibility and protection to the hybrid/multi-cloud assets and continuous compliance validations can be achieved through unified and integrated security solutions that are designed for public cloud.
Many organizations have adopted a cloud-first strategy and try to eliminate on-premise footprint for their applications and infrastructure. However, many legacy applications demand on premise setup due to dependencies, and add complexity and inefficiencies through multiple security solutions for hybrid environments.
Highly regulated industries like Banking/Insurance meet compliances likes PCI & GDPR. Their cloud service providers (CSPs) natively support the highest privacy controls and the ability to continuously assess their cloud workloads and applications against compliance standards, and alert the enterprises for the gaps with recommendations. Some countries’ (like UAE) laws mandate to keep sensitive data within their regions, and CSPs like Azure provide Geo locations to keep the data within their boundaries to achieve compliance.
One of the key concerns most enterprises have today is “Availability” of their cloud services. In the initial days of cloud adoption, confidentiality and compliance/governance were primary concerns, but with the CSPs’ advancing maturity over time, they are no longer a cause of concern. However, now, enterprises are heavily dependent on cloud services for their mission and business-critical applications.