EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
Migrating to the cloud can afford organizations a broad range of new opportunities and can confer numerous business advantages. An increasing number of use-cases for the cloud, combined with expanded a-la-carte, ‘as-a-service’ options and investment in multi-cloud strategies mean that the cloud is becoming even more popular than ever before, especially among cyber criminals. The cloud is a treasure-trove for hackers. Is your organization prepared for a cloud breach?
Out of all attack vectors and breach types within the cyber security landscape, cloud security breaches represent one of the most costly cyber security issues to contend with. The average total cost of a private cloud breach is $4.24M, while the average cost of a breach within a public cloud environment is $5.02M.
Only 39% of organizations cite a high degree of confidence in their ability to secure data in the cloud. And 40% of survey respondents indicate that 50% or less of their sensitive data had adequate cloud security safeguards around it.
Cloud security conundrums
Most organizations know that investing in the right cloud security solutions can mitigate cyber risk. Top barriers to cloud security adoption include:
- Lack of skills and knowledge on the part of employees.
- Lack of interdepartmental agreement regarding needs, budgeting, and time horizons.
- Lack of resources or interest in sourcing resources. (Beyond the basics, cloud security can also seem like a distant, abstract problem.)
The majority of cyber security professionals believe that the organization that they work for could become a breach victim within the next year. Regardless of the obstacles inherent in your workplace, try to accelerate your cloud security with an AI-based approach that can scale as your digital data footprint grows.
Why AI in cloud security
Cloud security environments are complex. Artificial intelligence can help security professionals identify threats that otherwise might be missed, it can be used to automatically block attacks and respond to incidents, and can reduce costs.
1. Identifying easily missed threats. AI can help monitor vulnerabilities, anomalies and issues that stem from user errors. It can also help sort through the hundreds, thousands or hundreds of thousands of alerts that companies receive everyday, preventing severe cyber damage to networks, while operating at speed and at scale.
2. Responding to incidents. Instead of waiting for information to reach high-level security team staff, AI-based tools can respond to threats almost instantly. It can block users, shut down systems or ports, or even take action against specific traffic.
3. Lowers breach costs. Cyber security researchers have determined that a data breach within an organization that has fully deployed security AI and automation can cost $3.05 million less as compared to organizations without. This is a 65.2% difference in average breach cost.
As an increasing number of organizations look to prevent unnecessary breach expenditures and trim labor costs in the face of a foretasted economic recession, the efficiencies built into AI-based security can assist organizations in retaining a strong security ROI.
Conclusion
Ultimately, artificial intelligence within cloud computing will be critical. Nearly a third of CISOs have adopted AI in response to ever-increasing cyber threats. The trend is likely to accelerate as a wider spectrum of CISOs begin to recognize the utility of an AI-powered cloud security platform.
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