After surveying more than 250 IT security leaders, Kaspersky Lab has discovered that uncontrolled cloud expansion is the top security concern for more than half (58%) of CISOs.

Cloud adoption is in full swing, with the latest IDG data showing that 73% of enterprises have at least one application, or a portion of their computing infrastructure, already in the cloud. But apparently that’s not enough – because the data also shows that IT departments are feeling the pressure to migrate 100% to the cloud. It’s clear that change is happening, and fast, but it is not without risk.

By using multiple cloud platforms within a hybrid cloud infrastructure, businesses can deliver their products and services faster, optimise their performance, and improve the reliability of their services. 

However, despite its advantages, cloud computing, especially when the cloud infrastructure is hosted by a third-party, may also bring additional cybersecurity challenges. An average data breach from an incident in the public cloud costs an enterprise £1.2 million, so, while an organisation’s overall IT infrastructure becomes heterogeneous with cloud, CISOs are facing more headaches to keep their data secure and protect company finances as a result.

Managing complex IT environments is also becoming even more difficult due to a lack of talent — another challenge for corporate cybersecurity. Hybrid cloud adoption requires specialists with the necessary skills to configure and manage security for all parts of the IT infrastructure. For CISOs, this results in staffing problems: more than a third (38%) claim it is difficult to recruit specialists to cope with this ‘cloud zoo’.

Against this backdrop, CISOs need a single solution that not only provides them with a high level of security, but also ensures the business’s cybersecurity layer is visible and can be managed across the whole cloud infrastructure, even by a limited cloud security team. 

Maxim Frolov, vice president of Global Sales at Kaspersky Lab explains, “There’s no denying that with the business benefits it brings, cloud is a key part of the strategic digital transformation journey for many enterprises. The use of cloud is growing fast, and businesses are not going to be put off adoption because of security concerns. It’s therefore vital that resilient security is also quickly and effectively implemented, to support this rapid adoption.

“Safeguarding data and workloads in the cloud environment, in addition to supporting the native security capabilities of a cloud platform is crucial,” continued Frolov.

“Protection layers should therefore include: the capability to monitor application behaviour and ban any suspicious activity; prevent exploits by using the latest threat intelligence; and find and automatically patch vulnerabilities, to safeguard data and workloads moving across cloud infrastructure, from threats. The best solutions also provide orchestration capabilities, so that IT teams can control what workloads are being accessed and processed, on and off-premise.”