New CSPM Report Highlights The Perceived Security Gap For Cloud Infrastructure

A security gap describes the difference between the level of security currently in place for your network, systems, or cloud infrastructure and the level of protection you should have for those digital assets. It’s a helpful metric because it allows you to identify areas where you need to focus more and apply additional resources. 

In this article, we will examine a different kind of security gap. This increasingly more important gap describes the difference between the level of security you think you have and the level of protection you actually have. It’s a gap between perception and reality so let’s call this the “perceived security gap.” 

Several key indicators of the significant gap between the perceived and actual levels of cloud security come from the 2021 State of Cloud Security Posture Management Report provided by the expert cloud security specialist OpsCompass. Published in June 2021, this study indicates that confidence in cloud security posture is high among IT professionals, yet most have experienced a cloud-related breach. 

The survey queried 253 full-time, US-based IT professionals who deploy, develop, or manage cloud applications or infrastructure. Additionally, 91 percent of the respondents are working with multi- or hybrid-cloud solutions. “These findings confirm what we’ve observed firsthand — cloud security is a major challenge,” said John Grange, CTO and co-founder of OpsCompass.

Cloud managers face several challenges that can compromise their environments, not the least of which are data leaks and configuration drift. In addition, visibility across their cloud environment and related issues, including misconfigurations, keep them up at night, as does managing identity and security baselines. 

Nearly 70 percent of the respondents said they have a high degree of confidence in their cloud security, visibility, and compliance capabilities. However, at the same time, more than half reported experiencing a breach. Additionally, one-third said they would not be surprised to see that their organization was breached. 

It is clear that many IT professionals are overconfident in their overall security capabilities, and it’s not the rank and file users in their organization they are most worried about. According to the survey, they’re most concerned about configuration errors, malicious insiders, and compromised accounts. They fear a breach will come from malicious software or malicious actors, as opposed to human error.

It is interesting to note that 93 percent of the survey’s respondents stated that their organization has a high level of visibility into their cloud environment. This answer would indicate that they believe their organization can continuously track and monitor all assets, configuration, deployments, and more. However, it is doubtful that they have the visibility and control they think they have, given that over half have experienced a breach. 

This false sense of security (in every sense of the word), or perceived security gap, must be addressed by actual, not perceived, real-time visibility, intelligence, and control.

Enabling operations teams to proactively know what’s in their cloud and what they need to fix is the best way to close the perceived security gap. 

Contributed by OpsCompass: 

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