Preventing Cloud Blindness

For many organizations, embracing the potential of the new digital economy involves migrating services, data, and infrastructure to the cloud. The cloud is a powerfully disruptive technology. It allows businesses to be more agile, responsive, and available than ever before by transforming traditional compute architectures and best practices that have been in place for decades.

Most organizations today have some sort of a cloud strategy. Nearly all of them are adopting a hybrid cloud infrastructure that combines their private cloud with one or more public cloud solutions. As a result, organizations now use an average of 62 cloud applications, with cloud-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) apps climbing to their highest value ever. And nearly half of all workloads are now being run in a cloud environment.

Unfortunately, many organizations are now facing a cloud skills gap every bit as serious as the one affecting cybersecurity. The result is that many companies are having a difficult time seamlessly integrating their traditional network with their new cloud environments.

And of course, every time you extend or alter the network you also expand the potential attack surface. Mobile computing, the increase of new applications, and the distribution of data into the cloud means that users, devices, and applications are able to access virtually any information or interact with virtually any user or device, from any location. New cloud-related risks include insider threats, especially from privileged users, compromised accounts, and shadow IT (where data and resources are stored or processed using cloud applications not approved by corporate).

The traditional security models and technologies we have relied on for decades were simply never designed to protect today’s elastic and highly virtualized environments. And as we continue to see, cybercriminals are ready and able to exploit every weakness in these new technologies or services. So, while we are in the process of re-engineering our businesses (and our society), it is also time to radically rethink security.

Read more in this article in CSO Magazine. Fortinet is helping customers secure their cloud implementations, whether private, public or hybrid.