Securing the Cloud Without Sacrificing Efficiency

Lookout is a Business Reporter client.

We’ve crossed the Rubicon when it comes to cloud adoption. Many organizations have undergone an accelerated digital transformation in the short span of two years. The reasons for this transition are clear: The cloud brings agility and ease of use to operations while reducing costs. If you don’t move to the cloud, you lose your competitive edge. 

As this transition takes place, the nature of security has changed. Protecting data has become a challenge as it moves wherever it is needed—across managed and unmanaged networks, devices and software. With everything interconnected, there are now countless ways for attackers to compromise your infrastructure. 

At this point of no return, security should provide businesses with robust control over their data, whether at rest or in motion across networks, clouds, applications and devices. At the same time, security needs to enable an organization’s employees, partners and ecosystem to access what they need, when they need it, to remain productive. 

The solution to this challenge lies not with treating networking and security as separate entities, but by the convergence of both in the cloud, working together to protect data. Security service edge (SSE) is an integrated solution that securely connects workers to any application hosted on private or public networks without sacrificing performance, user experience or security. 

Balancing the risk of data breach against user efficiency

On any given day, a typical worker accesses three different types of data: SaaS solutions, private applications and the global internet. HR accesses sensitive files on SaaS apps such as Workday or SAP SuccessFactors; data analysts access customer data stored on-premises or in private clouds; and just about every worker looks up terms on the internet. 

If you lock down any one of these channels, you severely limit your users’ ability to remain productive. On the other hand, without the proper controls and visibility in place, you risk exposing data publicly and violating compliance regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA and PCI DSS. 

The culprit behind most of the largest recent data breaches is data stored in the cloud with faulty permissions, usually due to human error. Gartner expects 99% of cloud security failures through 2025 will be the “customer’s fault,” mainly in the form of cloud misconfiguration. 

This human error is an inescapable consequence of overcomplexity in today’s modern IT architecture. Despite their ease of use, cloud systems can be extremely complex to secure, considering the scores or even hundreds of applications that chief information security officers (CISOs) typically need to configure. 

You don’t have to sacrifice security in the cloud

The alarming trend of large-scale data breaches calls for a reassessment of the systems in place to protect data. 

To accommodate accelerated digital transformation, many CIOs and CISOs strung together best-of-breed security solutions as a quick way to solve unique challenges in the cloud. But this has compounded the complexity: According to a recent survey from Ermetic, the average enterprise has 76 security products to juggle, each used for an individual use case. 

By consolidating these disparate products into a single SSE platform, CIOs and CISOs can build a more efficient security infrastructure that ensures that all data security and compliance considerations are met while also allowing open cloud data interaction. This is achieved by addressing all three of today’s main access models: SaaS apps, private apps and the web. 

Why organizations need a data-centric approach

As you look at procuring SSE technologies, you want to focus on vendors that not only provide connectivity, but also offer strong data protection capabilities.

One of the most important aspects of securing data in the cloud-first world is understanding the context in which a data event is happening. This could be a user accessing the data; the usage or access patterns of particular devices and users; or the indicated risk level of a user or device. 

Technologies such as data loss prevention (DLP), enterprise digital rights management (EDRM) and user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) are designed to detect and restrict access when the device or user risk level is too high. When integrated with SSE, these data protection tools work in tandem across an entire hybrid infrastructure to gain visibility into the risk levels of users and endpoints and map them to the sensitivity level of the data they seek to access.

Along with the proliferation of cloud applications, collaboration has skyrocketed. To maintain this momentum, implementing a data-centric cloud security strategy designed to fully protect data across networks, clouds, applications, users and devices—but not limit the freedom to grow and thrive—is a critical next step for organizations large and small. Want to learn more about Lookout’s unified approach to cloud security? Read our white paper: Five Top Risks When Operating in the Cloud—and What You Can Do About It.

To learn more about the Lookout cloud security platform, visit lookout.com/sase.

This article originally appeared in Business Reporter.

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