Cloudy security outfit Devo Technology has announced the results of a report assessing the current state and pace of change regarding enterprise cloud transformation initiatives and the ramifications on teams running a Security Operations Center (SOC).
The snappily titled report, “Beyond Cloud Adoption: How to Embrace the Cloud for Security and Business Benefits”, found that the global pandemic accelerated business transformation far past the cloud tipping point and uncovered severe and far-reaching implications for security teams. It also revealed that forward-thinking and high performing organisations took this opportunity to face the challenges head-on. Their businesses are far better for it—with more than half of high performing organisations seeing gains in capabilities and visibility.
The findings come from a survey conducted by the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) comprising 500 IT and security personnel in the ‘SOC chain of command’ at enterprise-class (i.e., more than 1,000 employees) organisations in North America and Western Europe in January 2021.
The global pandemic, and the associated surge in remote work, accelerated a massive move to cloud, with cloud-first organisations now outnumbering on-premise organisations by a ratio of three-to-one, with 81 per cent of organisations voicing that COVID had accelerated their cloud timelines and plans.
Across these companies, there was a 200 per cent jump in organisations planning to move more than 75 percent of their workloads to the cloud. More than 86 percent of companies placed cloud options in their decision process for new applications. More than 40 percent choose the cloud as their first option.
Jon Oltsik, Senior Principal Analyst & ESG Fellow, said it could not be clearer from conversations with these companies that cloud considerations are no longer a project-based decision, but an ‘all-in’ business strategy.
“Even at a time of increasing regulations and risks—and increasing IT complexity driven by cloud computing proliferation—organisations are moving aggressively to transform their businesses”, he said.
With such a massive and rapid shift, the current infrastructure of technology and people are not well aligned with these new realities. Respondents cited significant issues of complexity and overload—most notably, 80 per cent citing as much as 40 percent more security data on which they need to analyse and act. The staffing costs are high with 41 percent citing challenges of increased workload and 35 per cent identifying a security skill mismatch—all resulting in higher exposure. In 60 percent of organisations, they have seen an increase in threat and attack complexity and in more than 60 percent, it has exposed weaknesses in legacy security toolsets.
