More half of UK businesses have cited cyber-security concerns as the primary reason for not adopting public cloud within firms, according to new research released by Centrify.
Moreover, one-third of business decision makers who have adopted cloud are less than 80 per cent confident that the payment service is completely secure.
The survey, conducted via an independent polling agency Censuswide through survey of 200 business decision makers in large to medium-sized enterprises across the UK, showed that over one in four companies have already been targeted by a cloud hacker since the beginning of COVID-19 outbreak.
Kamel Heus, VP EMEA for Centrify, explained: “Adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic has been a bumpy ride for many businesses and, in most cases, companies have had to adopt the public cloud in at least some capacity due to the level of scalability, availability, and efficiency it provides for distributed workforces.
“Whilst the common misperception is that cloud security is quite different to that of on-premises infrastructure, it is by no means less secure if common security protocols are followed, and security controls are applied.”
Decision makers agreed that it is the increasing amount of machine identities and service accounts that are becoming the largest exposure point for their organisation.
They also said that their development teams were more concerned in getting around security than building into the DevOps pipeline.
“One core challenge posed by digital transformation is accurately verifying human and machine identities before granting access to systems, applications, and other high-value targets,” Heus continued. “Therefore, adopting cloud-ready privileged access management software is essential in protecting access to workloads in the public cloud, by granting access only when a requestor’s identity has been properly authenticated.”
