https://www.xperience-group.com/news-item/5-cloud-security-trends-to-look-out-for-in-the-rest-of-2024/
As our use of the Cloud grows (annual growth rate of 16.3% through 2026) so does the threat from cybercriminals. The latest Cyber Security breaches survey, published last month, found that half of all UK businesses, including a third of charities, reported having experienced some form of Cyber Security breach or attack in the last 12 months. Given the prominence of this threat, it is important for businesses to adapt to manage the risks. With this in mind, we have pulled together 5 Cloud Security Trends to watch in 2024.
Cybercriminals will search for Cloud weaknesses to exploit in a bid to target sensitive data stored in destinations that were previously unreachable. Misconfigurations and weak identity protection in Cloud infrastructures and applications will be targeted to cross boundaries between public and hybrid cloud environments. Hackers will target gaps at integration points created by hybrid multi-cloud applications.
Platform engineering is a practice built up from DevOps principles that seek to improve each development team’s security, compliance, costs, and time-to-business value through improved developer experiences and self-service within a secure, governed framework. The appeal of this practice in standardising development pipelines and developer experience has seen many integral engineering teams attempt to create customised platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings. 2024 will continue to see platform engineering being adopted.
Systematic approaches are required to create an effective security strategy, with a refined risk management process optimisation across the entire business. We will also see Cloud Security practices such as Zero trust (eliminate the notion of trust to protect networks applications and data) and continuous configuration monitoring becoming a standard process for enterprise security. Successful organisations will increasingly integrate Cloud telemetry (Software tools that record and analyse information about an IT infrastructure, that would otherwise be hard to gather) into their overall exposure management strategy. This will create an actionable security exposure remediation and improvement plan, that relevant figures in the business can understand and architecture teams (responsible for how IT infrastructure, solutions and services work together to find opportunities to optimise performance and reduce risk).
Organisations are looking for ways to centralise their security across their entire application sets in the Cloud. 2024 will see more companies adopt a Cloud-first approach when it comes to their day-to-day activities, and organisations will place previously siloed capabilities like data security posture management, DevOps security posture management and container security placed under a single Cloud umbrella. This helps to strengthen security as instead of having to monitor several application dashboards, organisations will just have one centralised dashboard.
Since 2023 AI has grown massively in popularity, and for the rest of 2024 and beyond it will likely continue to be a critical enabler of Cloud Security. AI has many advantages (including the automation of mundane tasks) and productivity benefits, but one of the biggest advantages is that AI can quickly analyse and prioritise the thousands of security signals admins receive daily. This helps teams to get to a state of real-time threat detection and automated response. Machine learning can be used to identify patterns in vast amounts of data, separate relevant signals from false security alerts and prioritise alerts based on their potential impact on their organisation.
In summary, the Cloud is only going to increase in size and use as time goes on. Whilst there are many advantages to using the Cloud such as real-time updates, collaboration and cost savings, it is important to acknowledge it comes with threats too. To put your organisation in the best position when using the Cloud, acknowledging trends is a good way to get one step ahead of the attackers.
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