Only 17% of organizations encrypt at least half of their sensitive cloud data

A female talking on a cellular phone walks past a cloud computing presentation ahead of the CeBIT technology trade honest in 2012. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

New exploration by Thales on security traits just one calendar year into the pandemic observed that about 50% of corporations say that they store additional than 40% of their information in exterior cloud environments, but only 17% have encrypted at minimum fifty percent of their sensitive information in the cloud.

Even though this raises some problems, the Thales 2021 Details Menace Report, dependent on a examine by 451 Exploration, pointed to some improvement in regulated industries. For case in point, 33% of health care respondents say they encrypt their information.

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Nonetheless, mitigating cloud-related knowledge breaches by way of details encryption stands as just component of the puzzle, mentioned Ted Driggs, head of product or service at ExtraHop.

“While we agree that encryption is an important part of securing the cloud, we truly feel it’s only a partial security technique and companies ought to do more to guard on their own against the complex attacks that have develop into our day by day fact,” Driggs said. “For total cloud security an organization really should encrypt info to guard it in the cloud and also employ genuine-time menace detection and response.” 

Kevin Kennedy, vice president at Vectra, claimed attackers adore the cloud for the exact reason businesses do: it merchants critical knowledge in a person quick to access spot. Now, it is unbelievably quick for adversaries to abuse consumer credentials and consider more than cloud accounts, he reported. Vectra investigate shows account takeovers in Office 365 have turn into the biggest risk vector in the cloud, while, according to the Verizon Details Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), 77% of cloud breaches involved account takeovers – with misconfiguration of creation environments and incorrect IAM and authorization configurations other prime threats.

“Once attackers have access, they could try to disguise their tracks or transfer laterally concerning cloud services and the network to access delicate data, or may well stay on the network undetected,” Kennedy reported. “This is why you have to have to have detection within just the cloud, not just avoidance-concentrated applications that test to end attackers getting access to systems. At some position, an attacker will get in. When they do, it’s essential they are caught before they have the probability to do any harm.”

The Thales survey also observed as the pandemic pushed organizations to the cloud several now use many companies for Infrastructure-as-a-Company (IaaS). Some 53% use AWS as their IaaS service provider and 41% decide for Microsoft Azure with substantial overlap throughout Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle and Alibaba.

Organizations are also much more measured in employing Platform-as-a-Company (PaaS) suppliers. The biggest share indicated they are using two (44%) PaaS companies. And 21% discovered that they use 3 PaaS suppliers. The use of several SaaS-delivered purposes was significantly bigger, as 27% usee a lot more than 50 SaaS applications and 16% use 51-100 SaaS programs.