Cloud adoption has increased rapidly among Australian organisations, with many moving their operations to the cloud. However, a new report from Palo Alto Networks has revealed that 93% of those surveyed struggle to detect, contain, and resolve cyber threats within an hour, due to the challenges of automating cloud security and mitigating risks. As a result, DevOps teams are under pressure to deliver production code at a faster pace, making application security more complex and adding pressure to security organisations to keep up.
Aussie organisations struggle to respond to cyber threats
The report also highlights that most organisations are slow to detect and respond to threats, with a majority reporting a weak security posture. Respondents noted the need to improve their underlying activities, such as gaining visibility into multiple clouds, applying more consistent governance across accounts, and streamlining incident response and investigation.
The Struggle to Secure Data in the Cloud
One of the key challenges of moving to the cloud is that teams often do not understand their security responsibilities, with over half of organisations stating that a majority of their workforce lacks this understanding. This underscores the need for greater education and training in cloud security best practices.
To address these challenges, companies are encouraging a deeper level of engagement between application developers and security teams, with 87% of Australian respondents saying they have embedded security professionals inside their DevOps teams. Additionally, consolidation of security tools and vendors is becoming more common, with 84% of organisations stating that they would benefit from a centralised security solution that sits across all of their cloud accounts and services.
Need for proactive security measures
Overall, the report highlights the importance of excellent Cloud Security as a clear enabler of business outcomes. While better security does not guarantee success, consolidating tools and vendors and using proven DevSecOps and security automation strategies can help development teams do their jobs better, and give organisations the tools they need to succeed. As more organisations continue to move their operations to the cloud, it is crucial that they prioritise cloud security to mitigate the risks of cyber threats.
