As more companies transition to the cloud, their sensitive corporate- and compliance-related data are no longer stored and used behind multiple layers of perimeter security. Instead, security teams are faced with multiple cloud services, each with its own type of privileges and actions and where each user has multiple identities across those different services. This is creating new challenges for security teams responsible for protecting their organizations from external cyberattacks while monitoring for internal human errors, including both intentional data leakage and inadvertent misconfigurations and oversharing. A prime example is when a Box leak exposed data from dozens of companies due to a misconfiguration in the sharing settings.
Today, companies make their best effort to secure their cloud environments. But the fact is their security teams lack cloud experience and the proper identity management tools to make informed decisions around permissions, identities and resources. This, in turn, makes it difficult for security teams to respond quickly to potential threats.
In addition, security teams need to constantly reaffirm their security posture with regard to user privileges, resource permissions and cloud usage in ways that don’t disrupt business operations. This includes determining where to step in, when to re-evaluate access privileges and how to intervene when there’s a potential security threat. Striking this balance presents a significant challenge for security teams who must continually add expertise to stay current with every service and remain fully equipped to identify risky privileges and actions, as well as assess user privileges.
Even though supplementing your internally managed cloud infrastructure with externally managed SaaS and IaaS services can reduce management costs and misconfigurations, it can also significantly increase your organization’s attack surface. This played out dramatically in April 2019
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