Public cloud spending and adoption has emerged as a growing sector. As per the assumptions made by analysts, organizations will spend $591.8 billion on cloud infrastructure and services this year, more than 20.7% from last year.
According to the Forrester, the public cloud market is set to reach $1 trillion by year 2026, with the lion’s share of investment directed to the big four, i.e. Alibaba, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft.
So, What Is Going On?
In the wake of pandemic, businesses hastened their cloud migration and reaped the rewards as cloud services sped up innovation, offering elasticity to adjust to change demand, and scaled with expansion. Even as the C-suite reduces spending in other areas, it is certain that there is no going back. The demand from businesses for platform-as-a-service (PaaS), which is expected to reach $136 billion in 2023, and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), which is expected to reach $150 billion, is particularly high.
Still, this rapid growth, which in fact caught business strategists and technologies by surprise, has its own cons. If organizations do not take the essential actions to increase the security of public cloud data, the risks are likely to grow considerably.
Shadow Data Is Growing Due to Lax Security Controls
The challenges posed by "shadow data," or unknown, uncontrolled public cloud data, is a result of a number of issues. Business users are creating their own applications, and programmers are constantly creating new instances of their own code to create and test new applications. A number of these services retain and utilize critical data with no knowledge of the IT and security staff. Versioning, which allows several versions of data to be stored in the same bucket in the cloud, adds risks if policies are not set up correctly.
Unmanaged data repositories are frequently ignored when the rate of innovation quickens. In addition, if third parties or unrelated individuals are given excessive access privileges, sensitive data that is adequately secured could be transferred to an unsafe location, copied there, or become vulnerable.
Three Steps to Improve Public Cloud Data Security
A large number of security experts (82%) are aware of, and in fact, concerned about the growing issues pertaining to the public cloud data security problem. These professionals can swiftly aid in minimizing the hazards by doing the following:
- Discover and Classify all Cloud Data
Teams can automatically find all of their cloud data, not just known or tagged assets, thanks to a next-generation public cloud data security platform. All cloud data storages, including managed and unmanaged assets, virtual machines, shadow data stores, data caches and pipelines, and big data, are detected. This data is used by the platform to create an extensive, unified data catalog for multi-cloud environments used by enterprises. All sensitive data, including PII, PHI, and transaction data from the payment card industry (PCI), is carefully identified and categorized in the catalogs.
- Secure and Control Cloud Data
Security teams may apply and enforce the proper security policies and verify data settings against their organization's specified guardrails with complete insights into their sensitive cloud data. Public cloud data security may aid in exposing complicated policy breaches, which could further help in prioritizing risk-based mannerisms, on the basis of data sensitivity level, security posture, volume, and exposure.
- Remediate Risks and Monitor Activities Without Hindering the Data Flow
The aforementioned is a process named data security posture management, that offers recommendations that are customized for every cloud environment, thus making them more effective and relevant.
Teams can then begin organizing sensitive data without interfering with corporate operations. Teams will be prompted by a public cloud data security platform to implement best practices, such as enabling encryption and restricting third-party access, and practicing greater data hygiene by eliminating unnecessary sensitive data from the environment.
Moreover, security teams can utilize the platform to enable constant monitoring of data. This way, security experts can efficiently identify policy violations and ensure that the public cloud data is following the firm’s mentioned guidelines and security postures, no matter where it is stored, used, or transferred in the cloud.
