Cybersecurity has grown significantly more complex over the past decade, with cyber attacks increasing approximately 60-fold. The average cost per attack has also risen sharply, from around $3.8 million in 2015 to $4.35 million in 2022.
However, this information is widely known due to the extensive coverage of ongoing cybersecurity issues. The more intriguing question is why cyber attacks have become so widespread and expensive.
If one had to identify the primary reason, it would be cloud computing. Cloud applications are not inherently more or less secure than on-premises applications. However, the advent of cloud computing has disrupted traditional cybersecurity practices and introduced a range of new security challenges that were nonexistent in the pre-cloud era. Considering the massive adoption of cloud computing services over the past decade, it appears that the growth of the cloud is a significant factor contributing to the increased cybersecurity challenges.
To elaborate, it is important to detail the various ways in which cloud computing has transformed cybersecurity and why these changes have fundamentally increased the complexity of maintaining security.
Complex Access Controls
Access controls, which determine who can access specific resources within a software environment, have been integral to security architectures for decades.
However, the rise of cloud computing has significantly increased the scale and complexity of access control rules. Previously, businesses only needed to secure access rights within operating systems and directory services. Now, they must also manage access controls within cloud environments. A single cloud environment can include hundreds of users and services, each with thousands of permissions or entitlements.
Furthermore, each cloud provider utilizes its own proprietary access control framework, making it easy for administrators to overlook crucial settings or assign excessive permissions.
These risks have given rise to a new range of cloud security tools, such as CIEM solutions, which help safeguard against insecure cloud access control settings. However, despite the automation these tools offer, cybersecurity teams still encounter significantly greater challenges in managing access controls compared to the pre-cloud era.
Heightened API Security Risks
The cloud has also spurred the proliferation of APIs, introducing an entirely new category of security risks.
While APIs existed before the cloud, they have become integral to the deployment and operation of modern workloads in a cloud environment. Today, a typical business relies on dozens, if not hundreds, of internal and external APIs to manage its cloud workloads. Each of these APIs presents potential vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit to access sensitive data or control critical services.
Consequently, the cloud has significantly heightened the security challenges businesses face concerning APIs, an issue that was rarely considered in the pre-cloud era.
Multiple Clouds
The emergence of multi-cloud architectures has also intensified modern cybersecurity challenges.
This is not because multi-cloud environments are inherently less secure than single-cloud ones. Rather, the complexity arises from the difficulty of monitoring, auditing, and securing multiple cloud environments simultaneously. Some security tools only support specific clouds, complicating efforts to centralize security in a multi-cloud setup. Additionally, differences in how each cloud vendor's services are configured can create security risks, as a setting that is secure on one platform may be insecure on another.
While centralizing security has always posed challenges—such as in environments with multiple operating systems—the complexity and diversity of a multi-cloud environment are typically far greater than those of an on-premises or single-cloud setup. Consequently, securing a multi-cloud environment is significantly more difficult.
Perimeter-less Networks
Remember when all applications ran on on-premises servers that could be neatly segmented from the internet using firewalls? Those days are over. Cloud computing environments, by their very nature, expose workloads to the internet, making them significantly harder to protect from abuse.
Although services like web application firewalls and virtual private clouds can provide some buffer between cloud workloads and the internet, they can't replicate the tight network perimeter that an on-premises environment allowed. Without adopting a complex strategy, such as air-gapping with a hybrid cloud, organizations will face increased network-borne security risks.
New Types of Cloud Cyber-security Attacks
The cloud has also introduced new types of cyber security attacks that wouldn't be feasible in traditional environments.
One such attack is the "denial-of-wallet" attack, where attackers inflate the cloud computing bills of their victims by triggering high-cost serverless functions. Another related attack is cryptojacking, where attackers use compromised infrastructure to mine cryptocurrency. They keep the mined coins while the victims are left to pay the mining costs. Although cryptojacking could technically occur with on-premises infrastructure, it is more damaging in the cloud, where attackers can exploit infinitely scalable resources to mine large amounts of cryptocurrency at their victims' expense.
The Increasing Security Costs of Cloud Computing
Certainly, none of the contemporary cybersecurity challenges stemming from the widespread adoption of cloud computing should deter its use. In many instances, the flexibility and convenience of the cloud outweigh the increased security risks.
However, these risks are undeniable, and it is crucial to acknowledge and effectively manage them when utilizing cloud services responsibly. The cloud has introduced a fundamentally altered cyber security landscape compared to a decade ago.
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