Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 23 | Page 21

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// TRENDING NEW MCAFEE REPORT REVEALS DATA IN THE CLOUD MORE EXPOSED THAN ORGANISATIONS THINK New research from McAfee has revealed that sensitive information stored in the cloud, SaaS collaboration and IaaS/PaaS configuration mistakes, along with cloud threats, are at all-time highs – creating significant risks to enterprise data. M cAfee, the device to cloud cybersecurity company, has released its Cloud Adoption and Risk Report, which analysed billions of events in anonymised customers’ production cloud use to assess the current state of cloud deployments and to uncover risks. The report revealed that nearly a quarter of the data in the cloud can be categorised as sensitive, putting an organisation at risk if stolen or leaked. Coupled with the fact that sharing sensitive data in the cloud has increased 53% year-on-year, those who do not adopt a cloud strategy that includes data loss protection, configuration audits and collaboration controls will endanger the security of their most valuable asset – data – while exposing themselves to increased risk of non-compliance with internal and external regulations. www.intelligentcio.com The study found that while organisations aggressively use the public cloud to create new digital experiences for their customers, the average enterprise experiences more than 2,200 misconfiguration incidents per month in their infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) instances. Cloud service providers only cover the security of the cloud itself, not customer data or customer use of their infrastructure and platforms. Companies are always responsible for securing their data wherever it is, hence highlighting the need to deploy cloud security solutions that span the whole cloud spectrum, from SaaS (software-as-a- service) to IaaS and PaaS. “Operating in the cloud has become the norm for organisations, so much so that our “ THE REPORT REVEALED THAT NEARLY A QUARTER OF THE DATA IN THE CLOUD CAN BE CATEGORISED AS SENSITIVE, PUTTING AN ORGANISATION AT RISK IF STOLEN OR LEAKED. INTELLIGENTCIO 21