The State of Cloud

Sep 03, 2021

Recent tech headlines tell a clear story that cloud governance and security issues are getting worse. Cloud-originated breaches and data exposures continue to mount, and it is clear that adversaries are increasingly targeting cloud assets to further their criminal ambitions.

There are number of reasons that cloud risks are growing, but data from Dark Reading's The State of Cloud Survey 2021 indicates that one of the biggest is a persistent lack of visibility in organizations, paired with what appears to be overconfidence among IT pros in their capability to keep track of cloud assets and their risk levels.

In this year's survey, we get a glimpse into not only the most common cloud architectures utilized by organizations today and the tools they use to track and manage their cloud assets, but also the perceptions of IT and cloud decision-makers about the overall security afforded by these tools. We then validated those perceptions against an existing body of research data from Censys security experts across real-world cloud deployments observed on the Internet to compare practices reported in the survey to realities in the field.

This study found…

that the visibility and tracking of Cloud assets remain lackluster
that a large disparity between research findings and the overconfidence with which respondents believe they are able manage cloud exposures
which of your Cloud security tooling still needs work
that overall rogue cloud assets are more common than respondents realize