Brainboard Report finds Cloud Security in Crisis as Security Engineers Drown in Alerts

A new report released by cloud infrastructure management company Brainboard.co has discovered a crisis in the cloud security world, with professionals spending 80% of their time battling fires caused by preventable security misconfigurations in the cloud.

The report found that, on average, cloud security systems are bombarded by an average of 500 security alerts per week. With the average cost of a data breach in the cloud being over $4 million, this represents a crisis for the industry and means professionals are left with little time or energy to focus on proactive measures that could improve their organization’s security posture.

Human Error

Human error remains a major contributor to cloud security incidents, being cited as the main reason behind 55% of breaches. However, more than 60% of cloud and DevOps engineers are junior, which means that sometimes they don’t even know they are building unsecure systems or introducing security breaches.

Chafik Belhaoues, co-founder & CEO of Brainboard, said: “This statistic makes it abundantly clear that relying solely on human vigilance in a complex cloud environment can lead to severe consequences.

“The fact is, organizations simply cannot afford to wait to be hacked before taking action, and taking a reactive approach is extremely expensive and unsustainable, especially with modern and sophisticated attack systems.

“The only way to remedy that is to adopt a proactive approach to security in a way that helps engineers build secure-by-design systems.”

Proactive Security in the Cloud

Chafik recommends some key strategies that your organization can adopt to get away from the reactive cycle.

He added: “The first big step to implementing proactive security for cloud architectures is to have an internal approved and secure library of building blocks that engineers can build with.

“Secondly, having a short security feedback loop that is close to users, such as ‘security shift left’, helps them build secure-by-design patterns.

“Finally, you can limit the blast radius by building isolated small cloud infrastructures. This reduces the impact to only the scoped environments or stacks.”

For more information on protecting your cloud infrastructure, visit www.brainboard.co.