Australia & New Zealand, 5 August 2021 - Vectra AI, a leader in threat detection and response, today released the findings of the PaaS & IaaS Security Survey Report. The report compiled the answers of 317 IT executives all using AWS, 70% coming from organisation of 1,000+ employees.
The findings show a rapid expansion and reliance on AWS services while simultaneously showcasing security blind spots
within many organisations.
As digital transformation efforts continue, the survey found that AWS is becoming an even more critical component to
organisations who are regularly deploying new workloads, leveraging deployments in multiple regions, and are relying on
more than one AWS service. The survey found:64% of DevOps respondents are deploying new workload services weekly or even more frequently78% of organisations are running AWS across multiple regions (40% in at least three)71% of respondents say that they are using more than four AWS services (such as S3, EC2, IAM, etc.)
The expansion of AWS services has naturally led to increased complexity and risk with 100% of companies surveyed having
experienced at least one security incident in their public cloud environment. Gartner anticipated that over 99% of cloud breaches will have a root cause of customer misconfiguration. Some blind spots the Vectra report uncovered include:30% of organisations surveyed have no formal sign-off before pushing to production40% of respondents say they do not have a DevSecOps workflow71% of organisations say that 10 or more people can modify the entire infrastructure in their AWS environments, creating
numerous attack vectors for hackers
Despite these blind spots, the survey showed that companies are taking security seriously. Over half of the companies
reported having double-digit security operations center (SOC) headcounts, showing a significant investment in keeping
their organisations secure.
Increasing cyber security threats when combined with a rapidly evolving cloud environment are creating a perfect storm
that’s also highlighting a significant skills gap, according to Chris Fisher, Director of Security Engineering APJ,
Vectra AI.
“Many customers across the region are struggling to find security staff that clearly understand the cloud and AWS
worlds. AWS skills are a bit more present, however, not mainstream and customers outside top tier enterprises are
struggling to find the skills needed to properly secure these environments. At Vectra we’re committed to helping
customers address these skills gaps while also supporting our partners with training. This will ensure we can
collectively work together to secure the enterprise environment.”
Securing the cloud with confidence is nearly impossible due to its ever-changing nature adds Matt Pieklik, Senior Consulting Analyst at Vectra. “To address this, companies need to limit the number of attack vectors malicious
actors are able to take. This means creating formal sign-off processes, creating DevSecOps workflows and limiting the
number of people that have access to their entire infrastructure as much as possible. Ultimately, companies need to provide security holistically, across regions and automate as many activities as possible to enhance their effectiveness.”
Vectra is further answering this industry need through the creation of Detect for AWS which reduces risk of cloud services being exploited, detects threats against AWS services, and automatically responds
to attacks against applications running in AWS.
To learn more about the threats facing today's organisations you can download the full Paas & IaaS Security Survey Report or read our companion blog.