The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) new survey, “State of Cloud Security Concerns, Challenges, and Incidents, finds that 58% of respondents are concerned about security in the cloud, while misconfigurations are one of the leading causes of breaches and outages, as public cloud adoption doubles over past two years.

Vectra AI released its global survey of 1,112 security professionals working in mid to large sized organizations using Microsoft Office 365. The results confirm that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated cloud migration and digital transformation amongst 88% of companies and that 71% of Microsoft Office 365 deployments have suffered an account takeover of a legitimate user’s account, not once, but on average seven times in the last year. 

Now that we’ve learned this dependency on the cloud will continue to grow, there are new challenges that organizations have to solve in the year ahead – starting with making these cloud infrastructures more secure. To do this, organizations must reroute the security perimeter to focus on identity. While cloud-based identity can be a complicated concept for a number of reasons, there are a few simple steps organizations can take to evolve their identity access management (IAM) strategies. By moving beyond “effective permissions,” they should instead focus on threats and risks, following a cloud IAM lifecycle approach.

Netskope revealed new research showing that the majority of all malware is now delivered via cloud applications, underscoring how attackers increasingly abuse popular cloud services to evade legacy security defenses putting enterprise data increasingly at risk. The findings are part of the February 2021 Netskope Cloud and Threat Report, which analyzes the most interesting trends on enterprise cloud service and app use, web and cloud-enabled threats, and cloud data migrations and transfers.