Comments
Enterprises always have that lurking fear of losing data that they kept in the cloud. Cyber security experts have warned that the risk is higher than what they have imagined.
The Cloud Adoption and Risk Report revealed that nearly a quarter of the data in the cloud can be categorised as sensitive, putting an organisation at risk if stolen or leaked.
“About 21 per cent of all files in the cloud contain sensitive data, which is more than 17 per cent in 2016. The number of files shared in the cloud with sensitive data has increased by 53 per cent year-over-year,” the report said. Sharing sensitive data with an open, publicly accessible link, has increased by 23 per cent over the previous year. Sensitive data sent to a personal email address also increased by 12 per cent.
The report analysed billions of events in anonymised customers production cloud use to assess the current state of cloud deployments and to uncover risks.
“Accidental sharing, collaboration errors in SaaS cloud services, configuration errors in IaaS/PaaS (infrastructure and platform as-a-service) cloud services, and threats are all increasing,” Rajiv Gupta, Senior Vice-President of McAfee's Cloud Security Business, said.
The average enterprise experiences more than 2,200 misconfiguration incidents a month in their infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) instances. “Cloud service providers only cover the security of the cloud itself, not customer data or customer use of their infrastructure and platforms,” he pointed out.
Cloud services like Box and productivity suites like Office 365 are used to increase the fluidity and effectiveness of collaboration. However, collaboration means sharing, and uncontrolled sharing can expose sensitive data, the report said.
The reported asked the enterprises to have a map of the cloud services that are in use, which of them held their sensitive data and how that data is being shared and with whom. “They should also identify anomalous behaviour, such as when the same user accesses the cloud from different locations simultaneously,” it said.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.