Increased cloud usage across enterprises is widening the potential attack surface for threat actors.
The 2024 Thales Cloud Security Study reveals that 66% of organisations use more than 25 software-as-as-service (SaaS) applications and 47% of sensitive corporate data are stored in the cloud. Despite increased risks to sensitive data in the cloud, data encryption rates remain low, with less than 10% of enterprises encrypting 80% or more of their sensitive cloud data.
This is alarming as cloud resources have become the biggest targets for cyberattacks, with SaaS applications (31%), cloud storage (30%) and cloud management infrastructure (26%) cited as the leading categories of attack.
Forty-four per cent of organisations were also found to have experienced a cloud data breach, with 14% reported having an incident in the last 12 months. Human error and misconfiguration continued to lead as the top root cause of these breaches (31%), followed by exploiting known vulnerabilities (28%), and failure to use Multi-Factor Authentication (17%).
The study also reveals that digital sovereignty -- where enterprises can independently control digital assets regardless of location, operational personnel or software compatibility constraints -- is an emerging security concern. Almost half (49%) of all Singapore respondents desired full control of encryption and key management capabilities so they would alleviate the fear of data breaches regardless of location.
“The scalability and flexibility that the cloud offers is highly compelling for organisations, so it’s no surprise it is central to their security strategies. However, as the cloud attack surface expands, organisations must get a firm grasp on the data they have stored in the cloud, the keys they’re using to encrypt it, and the ability to have complete visibility into who is accessing the data and how it is being used. It is vital to solve these challenges now, especially as data sovereignty and privacy have emerged as top concerns in this year’s research,” says Sebastien Cano, senior vice president for Cloud Protection and Licensing activities at Thales.
