Half of Aussie orgs would be crippled by a cloud breach

Almost half of Australian businesses believe a breach of their cloud environment would make normal operations impossible in their environment, new research suggests.

A global survey commissioned by zero trust security company Illumio and conducted by Vanson Bourne found that only 24% of Australian IT and security leaders report being confident they have the right preventative tools in place to prevent a breach.

Meanwhile, 23% of Australian respondents say it would be easy for an attacker to find weaknesses in their environment, and almost all (96%) believe they need security that better scales with the speed of cloud adoption. But at the same time, 73% of Australian respondents believe the security function slows down cloud adoption in their organisation.

There is also a growing disconnect between security capabilities and development teams, with 94% of respondents reporting a need to make it easier for DevOps teams to adopt cloud security best practices, and 97% citing a need to reduce workloads and increase efficiency for security operations teams.

Illumio Director of APJ Systems Engineering said 97% of Australian organisations have improving cloud security as a key priority for the year ahead.

“The primary aim of cyber attacks has evolved from data monetisation to disrupting business operations, making the cloud a key target. Alarmingly, nearly half of Australian businesses admit they would be unable to function if a cloud breach occurred,” he said. “This highlights the critical need for organisations to build attack-tolerant infrastructures. Since attackers must spread across a network to cripple essential operations, containing breaches and preventing lateral movement are crucial measures.”

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