What are the Security Implications for Businesses and Organizations Using the Public Cloud?

By Rohit Kumar, EVP & Head Cloud Security, Paladion Networks

The Cloud created new challenges for cybersecurity. First, it digitizes and migrates most assets and processes, dissolving the perimeter. Second, it creates a massive and interconnected attack surface—with countless new vulnerability points—for attackers to breach. And third, it creates a new set of specialized cybersecurity skills that most businesses and organizations are struggling to fill, which is slowing Cloud utilization.

A recent report makes this point obvious. The report found that, over the last two years, the cybersecurity skills gap has caused approximately 40-50% of IT professionals to slow down their cloud migrations. What’s more, businesses and organizations with a “cloud first” strategy have been twice as likely to slow migration over security concerns, compared to organizations with less substantial deployments.

This much is clear: Security concerns are likely preventing your business or organization from reaping the full benefits of the Public Cloud. And the more data and processes you plan to deploy to the Cloud, the more those security concerns will hold you back. But, ironically, just as the maturation of the Cloud has created a new set of cybersecurity challenges, this same technology is producing new solutions. The Cloud drives new cybersecurity capabilities and services that were unthinkable in the past.

Consider our example. At Paladion, much of our managed security services are enabled by, or driven through, the Cloud. Cloud networks allow us to connect our 1,000+ cybersecurity experts—located in SOCs in every time zone including our Dubai—to all of our global clients, allowing us to deliver true 24/7/365 security services.

What’s more, cloud infrastructure provides the horsepower behind our proprietary AI platform—AI.saac—allowing us to process hundreds of terabytes of threat and organizational data every day. And by prioritizing and partitioning services through a shared Public Cloud, we are able to provide a large volume of clients with next-generation managed security services at a price point that is much more affordable than the cost of developing equivalent capabilities internally.

In short: The Public Cloud is both creating new cybersecurity challenges and providing the keys to their solution. Veterans in the cybersecurity industry will find this dynamic feels familiar. Cybersecurity is an arms race. It has always been an arms race, and it always will be. Every time a new technology transforms the enterprise, cybercriminals rush to exploit the change, and cybersecurity experts find new ways to defend their businesses and organizations.

But in today’s evolution, one thing is different. The Public Cloud has increased the complexity of cybersecurity—and cyberattacks—so dramatically that few organizations can protect themselves on their own. This is particularly true of small and medium-sized businesses and organizations, who most need to leverage the benefits of the Cloud to compete with enterprises, but who lack enterprise-level resources to develop comprehensive security for their Cloud services in-house.

These businesses and organizations only have one solution. They must find and partner with a proven third-party security provider who can protect their Public Cloud for them, and allow them to deploy their new capabilities securely and in full.