2020 was a tough year. As security leaders, we faced new challenges in protecting applications and users who were shifting rapidly off-premises and into the cloud, and our security teams’ workloads grew at an unprecedented rate. In 2021 and 2022, CISOs need to prioritize ensuring that we’re focused on the right things.
Over the last year and a half, we all went through the monumental disruption of having just about everyone work from remote locations. We strained VPN infrastructure and out of necessity split tunnels became the norm, not the exception. Even if it meant the users were a bit more exposed, you really had no choice, as Zoom/Webex/Teams meetings can eat up bandwidth like nobody’s business. But now the users are starting to come back into the office, what’s the big deal?
Over the last year, we’ve published a number of blogs talking about NewEdge, the network or infrastructure upon which we deliver the Netskope Security Cloud services, and comparing it to other approaches cloud security vendors have taken.
There are multitudes of advantages that the cloud has to offer to companies. These include making the task of security management more accessible. However, there are still many gray areas associated with the cloud and its implications for an organization’s overall security.
Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) are major inhibitors for organizations moving to the cloud—and for good reason. Cloud environments are complex, and even a single misconfigured security group can result in a serious data breach. In fact, misconfigurations were the leading cause of cloud security breaches in 2020. This puts a lot of pressure on developer and operations teams to properly secure their services and maintain regulatory compliance.
In my previous post, I discussed cloud-computing security challenges identified in our new report, Beyond Cloud Adoption: How to Embrace the Cloud for Security and Business Benefits. Based on a survey conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), the report found that while cloud computing does initially introduce security challenges and increased complexity, it’s worth it in the end. That said, CISOs need to strategically invest time and resources to achieve better security outcomes.
Organizations have multiple reasons for embracing a multi-cloud strategy. First, it enables them to avoid “vendor lock-in” where they need to rely on a single vendor for all their cloud-based needs. Second, it empowers them to take advantage of the perks offered by several cloud service providers at once. Lastly, such a strategy helps to protect them against data loss and/or downtime, as an issue in one environment won’t necessarily spill over into another.
