It’s no secret that people and businesses are moving to the cloud at a rapid rate. The latest figures show that in 2018 most organizations will have around 40 per cent of its apps and platforms on the cloud. That number is expected to grow.
Given the convenience and cost effectiveness of the cloud; a much bigger question is: why isn’t it 100 per cent?
One of the main reasons for this is that companies are frightened to have a high profile cloud-related cyber-attack.
It wasn’t that long ago that UBER got hacked and the crooks walked away with personal data from 57 million users that included 600,000 U.S. automobile licenses.
What made this attack worse is the fact UBER kept it silent for more than a year and decided to pay the ransom.
The cyber crooks were able to grab log-in credentials from a GitHub repository used by UBER’s development team that was left unprotected.
That attack was from a business standpoint. But individuals are equally at risk. Case in point, last summer’s revelation that personal information from a staggering 198 million American voter records were left exposed brings to light the need for a simple, cloud-friendly solution that can protect data and people, while enabling access to data and apps anywhere in the world.
To put this hack into perspective, the population of the United States is more than 323 million. What makes this situation scary is it wasn’t a hack at all. The database was publicly accessible on an Amazon S3 server. The database had been misconfigured allowing it to be available to anyone searching online.
In the hands of a cyber-criminal, this type of voter data would be devastating to more than half the population of the United States.
One of the issues with protecting data in the cloud is that the security industry has not yet made it simple. Many still rely on data hardware-based virtual private networks (VPN) with a distributed management system. According to Amit Bareket, the co-founder and CEO of Perimeter 81, these systems are too complex, costly, and require extensive management. “They are not cloud-friendly.”
Perimeter 81 is an Israel-based developer of cloud-enabled VPNs with 24/7 protection that provides automatic WIFI security on the go.
With the GitHub hack, Bareket told EChannelNews it could have been prevented with a software-defined perimeter technology that would close cloud environments and SaaS services to everyone except authorized devices, users and locations.
“Networks cannot be trusted,” Bareket added. At Perimeter 81, Bareket has implemented a zero-trust security model that enables users to have direct access to cloud resources and apps. This technology evaluates the user permissions and related metadata to ensure secure access remotely.
“Utilizing it, organizations can ensure that only authorized connections are being established, while keeping the cloud completely hidden from all others including the black cloud.”
