Managing the Top Cloud Security and Compliance Risks

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Cloud computing has revolutionized enterprise technology over the past decade. As global cloud spend rockets towards $1.3 trillion by 2025, however, cyber risks also compound for organizations large and small.

Have you evaluated whether your company has the safeguards in place to weather the prime cloud threats on the horizon? This comprehensive guide examines the 12 most pressing challenges security leaders need to plan for to realize the full benefits of cloud adoption.

The Accelerating Cloud Revolution

Before analyzing key cloud risks, let‘s briefly recap the factors driving broad cloud adoption:

Flexible scalability – Cloud platforms allow companies to scale services and computing power up or down on demand, reducing reliance on costly on-premises data centers.
Cost efficiencies – Public cloud and SaaS solutions provide significant total cost of ownership (TCO) advantages compared to traditional models.
Business agility – Development teams can roll out, update and iterate SaaS apps faster, enabling innovation.
Global accessibility – Cloud services grant anywhere mobile access and global collaboration potential.

Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud solutions will grow by 20.4% this year to total $494.7 billion, reports Gartner. Furthermore, 75% of enterprises already follow a "cloud first" policy when evaluating new IT investments.

This shift generates immense strategic value – but also influences risk management priorities considerably…

12 Prime Cloud Risk Categories

Cybersecurity veterans and enterprise risk management teams have growing responsibilities to understand and mitigate risks related to:

Data exposures and breaches
API and application security
Infrastructure misconfigurations
Identity governance and access management
Architecture flaws
Supply chain dependencies
Cloud skills shortages
Account takeover threats
DDoS attacks
Data loss and destruction
Cloud spend optimization
Regulation and compliance

Let‘s explore each category in detail – from industry threats and impact data to security controls that help CISOs, CIOs and technology executives safeguard critical assets.

#1. Data Breaches and Exposures

Personal information, intellectual property and other sensitive records now largely reside offsite under third-party control – tempting targets for hackers and insiders alike.

Data exfiltration constituted the largest single root cause behind 5,212+ publicly disclosed breaches over the past decade according to Privacy Rights Clearinghouse statistics.
Misconfigured databases and data lakes played a role in 65% of recent cloud data leaks according to DivvyCloud.

Overall costs continue rising exponentially. The average data breach now costs impacted firms $4.35 million in remediation expenses plus legal, regulatory and recovery costs conveys IBM‘s 2022 report.

Beyond headline-grabbing ransomware attacks, common data loss vectors involve:

Malicious insiders abusing privileges
External threats infiltrating networks
Database misconfigurations exposing troves of data
Code flaws enabling server-side request forgery (SSRF) attacks against storage
Compromised credentials providing backend bucket access

Diagram: Major Data Breach Avenues in Cloud Environments

Keeping sensitive information secure requires a combination of:

Restrictive access controls and identity management
Database encryption plus tokenization
Next-gen cloud workload protection platforms
SIEM monitoring and behavior analytics
Robust cloud security posture management

Implemented holistically – these controls significantly reduce breach risks from both outside attackers and insider threats.

Now let‘s explore another prevalent attack vector – insecure interfaces and APIs…

#2. API and Microservices Insecurity

APIs and microservices introduce attack surfaces that attackers actively exploit:

Public cloud APIs can provide direct access to consoles and programmatic control
IaaS misconfigurations enable API abuse to pivot across cloud assets
Web and mobile APIs facilitate account takeover, data extraction and injection attacks

Research shows:

80% of applications now leverage APIs in some form – presenting integration, automation and extensibility advantages
But only 26% of organizations integrate API security into testing processes according to Cloud Security Alliance surveys

Common exploitation patterns include:

Broken authentication flaws enabling account hijacking
Lack of rate limiting protections against DDoS attacks
Absence of input validation checks being susceptible to code injections
Overly permissive credentials allowing broad data access
Information leaks exposing internals through error messages
Lateral traversal across connected systems and resources

API Security Best Practices

Fig: Core API Security Principles to Follow

API security deserves dedicated focus given increasing reliance on integration fabric and microservices communications across cloud, mobile and IoT initiatives enterprise-wide.

Now let‘s shift our discussion to a pervasive challenge – misconfigured infrastructure…

#3. Insecure Infrastructure as Code

Cloud‘s programmatic agility introduces risks if security isn‘t embedded early across infrastructure layers:

Storage bucket permissions and firewall rules protecting cloud data
Identity and access controls governing cloud admin accounts
Inconsistent security groups and login credentials across accounts/regions
Lack of workload isolation for high trust apps (finance, healthcare, PII data etc.)
Absence of data encryption allowing plaintext extraction

Research shows misconfigurations play an outsized role in cloud security incidents:

99% of misconfigurations go unnoticed for an average of 200+ days conveys Palo Alto Networks
F-Secure consulting found 75% of reviewed AWS S3 storage buckets to have risky or unauthorized access permissions enabled

Fig: Common areas of insecure infrastructure as code across cloud environments

Getting governance right involves:

Infrastructure entitlement reviews ensuring least privilege access
Security policy as code to propagate controls across environments
"Shift left" testing for secrets, images and infrastructure pre-production
Continuous cloud security posture management

Now let‘s explore access control and identity management challenges…

#4. Identity Governance Gaps

Overprivileged identities, loose credential policies and authentication flaws contribute substantially to cloud data breaches each year.

Consider proof points across Gartner and Microsoft research:

Privileged credential abuse plays a role in 25% of destructive attacks and 60% of major cloud breaches
Just 1-in-10 organizations have implemented cloud-first identity models conveys Okta
90% of enterprises have an identity-first surface area 6x larger than devices managed

Common on-premises identity & access management (IAM) pitfalls magnify in cloud scale:

Stale, overly permissive roles and entitlement creep
Lack of visibility into managed/federated identities
Easy-to-guess passwords relied on alone
Failure to integrate IAM across hybrid environments

Addressing such gaps, CISO consensus identifies core must-haves:

Fig: Core identity and access management principles to follow per enterprise security teams

Now that we‘ve covered key access risks, let‘s explore common architecture oversight…

#5. Poor Architecture Decisions

Design flaws that introduce availability, resilience and security gaps represent a fifth primary risk category:

Monolithic single-zone deployments invite disruption via DDoS attacks, regional failures and more
Lack of logging, audit trails and analytics to monitor administrator/user activity
Absence of network microsegmentation and workload isolation
DevOps release automation outpacing security reviews
Cloud interdependencies chaining risk across vendors

Consider proof points showcasing enterprise struggles:

60% of companies can‘t identify data flows across cloud services conveys Fujitsu
80% operate without consistent data classifications across hybrid environments according to Entrust

Remediating architecture shortcomings involves:

Multi-region/zone cloud infrastructure designs
Implementation of zero trust access principles and microsegmentation
Security automation to ensure controls remain intact through CI/CD
Classifying data sensitivity then applying appropriate controls

Now let‘s examine supply chain complexities…

#6. Unmanaged Vendor & Supply Chain Risk

Enterprise attack surfaces expand exponentially as SaaS apps and infrastructure partners multiply across ecosystems:

The average company connects with 64 cloud services yet just 20% monitor them for risks according to BetterCloud telemetry
Meanwhile, software supply chain attacks increased 650% in 2021 notes Prevalent research

Common blindspots include:

Cloud services that don‘t meet internal security standards
Vendor deficiencies in encryption, availability and access controls
Lack of visibility into data custody across suppliers
Absence of compromise detection or incident response planning

Addressing third-party risks in sustainable ways involves:

Cloud vendor assessments validating security & compliance posture pre-integration
Contract terms codifying customer security guarantees and liability
Monitoring, logging and optics into supplier administrators, data flows and tooling
Broader cyber risk quantification models reflecting external dependencies

Now let‘s explore skill and staffing gaps inhibiting cloud success…

#7. Talent Shortages

Migrating legacy systems to cloud platforms represents a formidable culture shift for many enterprises. Consider proof points:

58% say skills deficits most significantly hinder cloud security & compliance initiatives according to Intel
77% of organizations struggle integrating security into CI/CD pipelines conveys CheckPoint

Common capability gaps include:

Immature DevSecOps practices with disjointed automation
Lean teams without necessary architecture fluency
Insufficient training managing provisioning and identity federation
Perceived loss of data visibility and operational control
Integration challenges moving legacy systems, apps, data sets

Expert staff plus managed security service providers help bridge proficiency divides – providing training plus tactical support during major cloud transformations and buildouts.

Now that we‘ve covered internal risks, let‘s explore account compromise threats…

#8. Account Takeover and Identity Fraud

With personal information abundantly available via breaches online, attackers increasingly hijack cloud accounts for profit:

Cloud account compromise escalated 630% YoY in 2021 reports Akamai
Credential abuse plays a role in 25% of destructive attacks according to Microsoft

Tactics involve:

Password spraying to brute force into web consoles
Phishing sites tricking users to input their credentials
Exploiting misconfigurations like open data buckets
SIM card swap fraud to intercept MFA tokens

Implementing robust access controls and monitoring helps counter account takeover attempts:

Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
Identity-aware SSO and proxy solutions
User behavior analytics to spot anomalies
Passwordless authentication models

Now let‘s examine denial of service conditions…

#9. DDoS Attacks

For decades, denial of service campaigns have threatened online services – with cloud hosting now firmly in the crosshairs:

AWS mitigated a record-setting 2.3 terabits per second (Tbps) DDoS attack in 2021
The average DDoS downtime outage now costs $221,000 conveys IDC

Key risks include:

Direct flood attacks against cloud-hosted sites and apps
Abuse of vulnerabilities in connected OT and IoT gear
Exploitation of memory and CPU resource limits

Common mitigation principles:

Overprovisioning infrastructure capacity
Regional scale load balancing
DDoS prevention services
Web application firewalls
Anti-automation protections

Now let‘s explore system integrity and data loss scenarios…

#10. Data Destruction and Integrity Loss

Despite extensive redundancy mechanisms across fault domains, catastrophic data loss remains a threat where backups prove outdated or unreliable.

80% of organizations paid ransomware extortion averaging $1.27M during recovery efforts last year according to Veeam
Another 10% endured outages exceeding 25 hours through backup deficiencies

Threats run the gamut – from code flaws deleting databases through administrator errors to ransomware encrypting then exfiltrating terabytes of data:

Fig: Common data loss conditions in cloud environments

Data lifecycle management and resilience considerations include:

Geo-distributed database architectures
Object versioning and snapshotting
Isolated, air-gapped backups
Encryption plus access controls
Data lifecycle automation

Now let‘s switch gears to cost control concerns…

#11. Cloud Spend Waste

Early cloud cost savings often reverse into budget overruns over time:

30% of enterprises expend over $12M more than planned across their initial three years of cloud usage per Gartner
Leading drivers include excess storage, idle resources, diminished economies of scale

Consider contributing factors:

Complex and dispersed billing across environments
Demand variability and overprovisioning
Subscription sprawl across unused SaaS apps
Infrastructure entanglement across legacy systems

Site reliability engineers have extensive tooling to model, optimize, automate and refine cloud consumption:

Usage metering, inventorying and spend dashboards
Scheduled autoscaling, resource hibernation and right-sizing
RI utilization tracking and volume discounting
Decommissioning of stale instances

Now let‘s switch context to explore compliance risks…

#12. Governance & Compliance Gaps

Despite extensive security controls, operational responsibility across cloud providers, partners and subscribers grows ambiguous – magnifying audit, policy and regulatory compliance risks.

Consider research insights regarding governance gaps:

29% of companies now experience weekly cloud security incidents due to compliance failures and misconfigurations according to Palo Alto
Meanwhile, 70% of firms defer cloud migrations due to data residency, privacy and regulatory concerns notes IDC

Reconciling complex, conflicting and evolving obligations across regions and hybrid infrastructure requires tight collaboration with cloud service providers to boundary very clearly:

Data custody, storage and transmission
Incident notification standards
Administrative access and activity transparency
Anomaly detection and threat notification
Contract certification adherence

Key Takeaways

This concludes our analysis of the top dozen cloud security and compliance risk categories that enterprise leaders and technology executives need to address today.

Cloud platforms introduce new data protection, identity, architecture and supply chain security considerations – but also bring formidable advantages if managed diligently.
As external threats mount in sophistication, reducing enterprise risk exposure requires proactive planning and continuous security modernization.
Partnering closely with cloud service providers, auditors and compliance teams while automating security postures can help reconcile gaps.

Hopefully this guide provided a useful overview of priority focus areas in your cloud risk management journey. Please don‘t hesitate to get in touch if any questions arise or if you need assistance shoring up cloud security foundations.

Warmly,
[Your Name] Independent Cloud & Security Advisor