New research highlights significant AWS security blindspots

Vectra AI 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 organization of 1,000+ employees. The findings show a rapid expansion and reliance on AWS services while simultaneously showcasing security blind spots within many organizations.

As digital transformation efforts continue, the survey found that AWS is becoming an even more critical component to organizations 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 frequently
78% of organizations 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 organizations surveyed have no formal sign-off before pushing to production
40% of respondents say they do not have a DevSecOps workflow
71% of organizations 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 organizations secure.

“Securing the cloud with confidence is nearly impossible due to its ever-changing nature,” said 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.”

To learn more about the threats facing today's organizations you can download the full Paas & IaaS Security Survey Report or read the Vectra companion blog.

In today's rapidly evolving security landscape, organizations face an ever-growing array of disruptive events, security threats and risks. Traditional reactive approaches to security intelligence often leave businesses vulnerable and ill-prepared to anticipate and mitigate emerging threats that could impact the safety of their people, facilities or operations.

ON DEMAND: Apple Mac computer use is growing in the corporate space. Having the solutions and the knowledge base to respond to events that include Mac computers is just as important as their Windows counterparts.