Nearly half of Aussie firms dread cloud breaches hindering ops

Research released by Illumio indicates that nearly half of IT and security leaders in Australia believe a cloud breach would render normal operations in their organisations impossible.

This information follows the Notifiable Data Breaches Report by the OAIC, which revealed that Australia had the highest number of data breach notifications from July to December 2020.

The findings are part of Illumio's Cloud Security Index: Redefine Cloud Security with Zero Trust Segmentation, showing that 97 percent of Australian organisations view improving cloud security as a key priority for the next year. Andrew Kay, Director of APJ Systems Engineering at Illumio, commented, "The primary aim of cyberattacks has evolved from data monetisation to disrupting business operations, making the cloud a key target. Alarmingly, nearly half of Australian businesses admit they would be unable to function if a cloud breach occurred."

"This highlights the critical need for organisations to build attack-tolerant infrastructures. Since attackers must spread across a network to cripple essential operations, containing breaches and preventing lateral movement are crucial measures."

One of the main concerns highlighted involves the ability to stop lateral movement within networks. Lateral movement allows hackers to penetrate deeper into a system and access sensitive data and high-value assets. The study found that 23 percent of Australian IT and security leaders believe it would be easy for an attacker to find weaknesses in their environment to gain entry.

These respondents cite minimal or no controls in place to limit network discovery and lateral movement, coupled with few preventative and detective controls. Conversely, only 24 percent expressed confidence that they have the right preventative measures to make it difficult for attackers to find vulnerabilities.

Traditional security tools were found to be a hindrance to cloud adoption and innovation. Ninety-six percent of Australian organisations said they need security solutions that can better scale with the speed of cloud adoption. Furthermore, 73 percent of IT and security decision makers believe that their current security functions slow down cloud adoption within their organisations.

The research also uncovered a significant disconnect between security teams and developers. Half of the respondents asserted that their business needs to improve collaboration between security and application developers. Additionally, an overwhelming 94 percent of IT and security decision makers believe it is necessary to make it easier for DevOps teams to adopt cloud security best practices. Similarly, 97 percent think there is room for improvement in reducing workloads and increasing efficiency for SecOps teams.

The study's results underscore the urgent need for Australian businesses to enhance their cloud security measures to ensure operational resilience.