A report from Thales has revealed businesses find cloud privacy and data protection more complex to manage than on-premises.
Most businesses believe cloud privacy and data protection are more challenging to manage than on-prem. Yet, according to the 2022 Thales Cloud Security Report conducted by 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, increasingly complex cloud environments are on the rise.
Globally, cloud adoption, and especially multi-cloud adoption, continues to increase. There has been an expansion in the use of multiple IaaS providers, with almost three-quarters (72%) of businesses using different IaaS providers, up from 57% the year before.
The use of multiple providers has almost doubled in the last year, with one in five (20%) respondents using three or more providers.
Despite rapid growth in the prevalence and use of cloud services among businesses, researchers indicate many are still understanding how to protect the complicated environments they have created.
Security challenges of multi-cloud complexity
With increasing complexity comes an even greater need for robust cybersecurity, with many businesses suffering a cloud-based data breach or failed audit.
Cyberattacks also present an ongoing risk to cloud applications and data. Respondents reported an increasing prevalence of attacks citing an increase in ransomware, malware and phishing/whaling.
Protecting sensitive data
When it comes to securing data in multi-cloud environments, many IT professionals view encryption as a critical security control. Most respondents cited encryption, multi-factor authentication and key management (47%) as the security technologies they currently use to protect sensitive data in the cloud.
Fernando Mellone, Sales Director, Dynatrace Brazil
Successful Digital Transformation requires applications, digital services and dynamic multi-cloud platforms adopted to deliver these services function seamlessly. However, these dynamic applications, highly distributed and developed natively in cloud technologies, are very different from their prototypes.
The complexity brought by microservices, containers and infrastructure-defined software is better than we can imagine when we think about the scale of the web. Humans can no longer keep up with the volume, variety and speed of generated data. All this data explosion must be handled so that IT teams do not expose their resources to their limits resulting in fatigue, stress and wasted time.
The methods by which companies analyze this data to keep their systems and software running remain the same. We still see the famous IT operations centers with many people and panels.
With more data, software, infrastructure, applications and end-users, the screening process becomes much more difficult. The manual management of these environments brings substantial and continuous operational losses.
How to overcome these obstacles?
The only way to avoid cloud collapse is to deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities for IT Operations (AIOps), which bring accurate answers about where problems are happening, as situational awareness of how the ecosystem works.
Davis, Dynatrace’s Artificial Intelligence Assistant, quantifies the negative effect on the business, prioritizes issues based on this impact and provides answers about the origin, nature and severity of any vulnerabilities that arise in real-time from the application’s code execution on production and pre-production. It allows the BizDevSecOps teams to focus on what matters.
Today, data relies on a hybrid and multi-cloud. Applications are API-based, which makes them more vulnerable. Companies struggling with the complexity of the cloud and looking to deliver seamless and secure digital interactions need end-to-end observability, with AIOps and application security for intelligent data automation and responses.
It frees teams up to focus on accelerating innovation and optimizing user experiences in a world where the software needs to work flawlessly.
Ulisses Pimentel, Director of Cloud Business Transformation, IT-ONE
We are experiencing a second phase of adoption of the cloud computing universe, with companies mainly opting for hybrid cloud solutions for different reasons. Whether due to costs, technical demands, business characteristics, previous negative experience with cloud offerings or even regulatory issues that vary according to the region where they operate.
With this hybrid structure, companies are now facing enormous complexity in managing and integrating different architectures into a process that helps them maximize the value added by the cloud in their day-to-day business.
I follow several growing initiatives and projects that live the journey of adoption to the cloud as the basis of Digital Transformation. These facts and experiences guide my advice for companies to put aside their fear of this complexity and see that the cloud is part of a strategy for discoveries and is fundamental to building organizations of the future.
This complexity opens the door to the exercise of in-depth mapping of difficulties and questioning old business concepts in each segment or multi-segment of operations.
Only with this acquired and structured self-knowledge companies, take this step of treading a consistent migration and modernization plan through the cloud to meet their new challenges of cost, revenue and customer experience management in the digital universe.
Solutions to deal with this new and complex environment require new control panels and service delivery, performance analysis, new layers of security, on-demand cost management, monitoring, and, finally, governance of integrated processes in more than one environment.
By gradually managing and building these pillars based on people, a solid learning culture and technology tools launched and enriched all the time, enterprises create the foundation for the selection, constant and incremental use of the numerous digital services, the level of innovation, the scalability, and the agility that public cloud providers provide in this constantly changing market.
Cléber Ribas, CEO, Blockbit
In recent years, the idea that, from now on, all companies are technology operations has been accepted, which makes sense, especially if we consider the dependence that our companies, in general, have on the devices, networks and applications that border their working hours. Can you imagine the day-to-day life of your organization without the Internet and computers?
A fundamental and often undervalued thing in this context is information. Data is like the blood that circulates in the corporate body: these records help us make decisions and plans for the future and understand the past, among other things. Therefore, the importance of cybersecurity as a vital element to boost results is increasingly evident.
Migration to the cloud increases the need for connectivity to access systems with quality but a technology that can provide high availability of access, with a granularity of management and security features, is extremely important to enable connectivity and guarantee a better performance for organizations.
This new horizon requires companies to take care of data besides each point of contact (the endpoints) since the cloud and the Internet will be part of an ecosystem with more and smarter devices.
All these resources can pose a threat to information security and, consequently, to operations. One piece of advice would be to adopt Secure SD-WAN solutions that, in addition to being cost-effective, make the management and maintenance simpler especially in projects with many points of presence.
Spreading a security-oriented culture, balancing innovations and data protection is to strengthen everything that interacts with data. Maintaining good practices, having teams aware of their actions and having the most advanced cybersecurity technologies are undoubtedly a crucial triad for organizations’ demands.
In times marked by the constant search for new and better experiences, finding ways to encourage sustainable and safe development of organizations involves promoting practices and infrastructures that maximize customer privacy, employee productivity and efficiency and cost-effective Business Continuity.
It is necessary to invest in mentoring campaigns, and companies must be able to rely on firewalls, VPNs, antivirus software, intelligent systems software and intelligent systems to extend the power of corporate cybersecurity.
According to Gartner research, almost 85% of companies plan to adopt hybrid work models with professionals working at least part of their routines from home.
