IT professionals more worried about corporate security than home security: Study

Data security is creating fear and trust issues for IT professionals, according to the third-annual Oracle and KPMG Cloud Threat Report 2020. The study of 750 cybersecurity and IT professionals across the globe found that a patchwork approach to data security, misconfigured services and confusion around new cloud security models has created a crisis of confidence that will only be fixed by organizations making security part of the culture of their business.

Data Security is Keeping IT Professionals Awake at Night

Demonstrating the fear and trust issues experienced by IT professionals, the study found that IT professionals are more concerned about the security of their company’s data than the security of their own home.

• IT professionals are 3X more concerned about the security of company financials and intellectual property than their home security.
• IT professionals have concerns about cloud service providers; 80% are concerned that cloud service providers they do business with will become competitors in their core markets.
• 75% of IT professionals view the public cloud as more secure than their own data centers, yet 92% of IT professionals do not trust their organization is well prepared to secure public cloud services.
• Nearly 80% of IT professionals say that recent data breaches experienced by other businesses have increased their organization’s focus on securing data moving forward.

Legacy Data Security Approaches Leave IT Professionals Playing Whac-A-Mole

IT professionals are using a patchwork of different cybersecurity products to try and address data security concerns, but face an uphill battle as these systems are seldom configured correctly.

• 78% of organizations use more than 50 discrete cybersecurity products to address security issues; 37% use more than 100 cybersecurity products.
• Organizations that discovered misconfigured cloud services experienced 10 or more data loss incidents in the last year.
• 59% of organizations shared that employees with privileged cloud accounts have had those credentials compromised by a spear phishing attack.
• The most common types of misconfigurations are:
  • Over-privileged accounts (37%)
  • Exposed web servers and other types of server workloads (35%)
  • Lack of multi-factor authentication for access to key services (33%)

Shifting Responsibility: Causing More Confusion and More Security Breaches

Organizations are moving more business-critical workloads to the cloud than ever before, but growing cloud consumption has created new blind spots as IT teams and cloud service providers work to understand their individual responsibilities in securing data. This confusion has left IT security teams scrambling to address a growing threat landscape.

• Nearly 90% of companies are using software-as-a-service (SaaS) and 76% are using infrastructure-as-a-service today (IaaS); 50% expect to move all their data to the cloud in the next two years.
• Shared responsibility security models are causing confusion; only 8% of IT security executives state that they fully understand the shared responsibility security model.
• 70% of IT professionals think too many specialized tools are required to secure their public cloud footprint.
• 75% of IT professionals have experienced data loss from a cloud service more than once.

It’s Time to Build a Security-First Model

To address increasing data security concerns and trust issues, cloud service providers and IT teams need to work together to build a security-first culture. This includes hiring, training, and retaining skilled IT security professionals, and constantly improving processes and technologies to help mitigate threats in an increasingly expanding digital world.

• 69% of organizations report their CISO reactively responds and gets involved in public cloud projects only after a cybersecurity incident has occurred.
• 73% of organizations have or plan to hire a CISO with more cloud security skills; over half of organizations (53%) have added a brand new role called the Business Information Security Officer (BISO) to collaborate with the CISO and help integrate security culture into the business.
• 88% of IT professionals feel that within the next three years, the majority of their cloud will use intelligent and automated patching and updating to improve security.
• 87% of IT professionals see AI/ML capabilities as a “must-have” for new security purchases in order to better protect against things like fraud, malware and misconfigurations.