Do Cloud Account Breaches Cost Organizations Millions of Dollars Each Year?
“Cloud is a challenge to security, but one that can be overcome.”
In recent years, several organizations are adapting to cloud computing technology which has gained large popularity in the domain of Information Technology. But does it provide enough security so that their data won’t be theft? Let us read more about the impact of cloud breaches in this article.
What Is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services that includes servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence, over the Internet (the so-called “Cloud”) to provide faster innovation, adaptable resources, and economies of scale. In simple words, cloud computing refers to the storage and access of data and programs over the internet instead of your computer’s hard drive.
What Is Meant by Data Breach?
As the entire process happens over the Internet, there are many chances that the data may get breached. Data breach can result in revealing sensitive information to unauthorized parties. Data breaches, which may be caused due to theft, phishing, system glitches, data mishandling, are to be taken as a top security concern in cloud computing.
Though cloud service providers aim for providing the utmost secured protection of data and services for their customers, several reputed companies continuously suffer from data breaches.
Moreover, the Coronavirus pandemic has pushed many companies to take their operations online. So, this has become a breeding ground for cloud hijackers to carry out cloud attacks. For example, a recent hack has made severe consequences that made Twitter’s share go down by 3% which targeted several Twitter profile accounts.
2021 Ponemon Institute Report on Cloud Account Breaches
- Research conducted by Ponemon Institute reveals that cloud account breaches cost more than $6 million each year.
- For the process of editing a new report titled “Cloud breach and shadow IT costs”, cybersecurity companies and IT security research organizations have surveyed more than 600 IT and IT security professionals across the United States.
- Around 68% of the professionals conveyed that cloud account hijacking causes severe security risks to organizations. They also said that the frequency and severity of cloud account breaches have increased over the last year.
- The Chairman and Founder of Ponemon Institute, Dr Larry Ponemon, informed in a press release that the increased adoption of “Saas” security leads to increased security risks.
- Most of the respondents specified that Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 accounts are highly targeted by brute force and phishing-based cloud crimes.
- As millions of workers use cloud apps and services that have not been approved by the organization’s IT department, Shadow IT leads to great security risks.
- Also, the increased number of work from home employees and the increased use of online collaboration software and messaging tools to share sensitive information puts the organizations at substantial risks.
- On average, reputed companies in the US face the highest costs of around $8.19 million per cloud breach.
Here is a presentation by DivvyCloud that explains the top services and errors that have led to large-scale data breaches in the past several years, ways to prevent future breaches, and a few case studies of prominent breaches.
How To Prevent a Cloud Data Breach?
We could see that more and more companies are adopting cloud services for their speed and flexibility. To avoid cloud account breaches, the base of cloud security and its services should be strengthened.
Cloud security strategies provide the following technologies:
- Encryption and decryption of data
- Multi-factor authentication
- Strong firewall
- Single sign-on(SSO)
- Identity providers(IP)
- Access control
- Strong and secured passwords
- Backup plans
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