Cyber Risks: How Automation Can Secure Your Cloud Assets

Cloud computing has been a boon for business intelligence with benefits such as cost reduction, improved performance, flexibility, and scalability. In fact, nearly 90 per cent of devices in modern organizations are cloud-based. However, as more corporate assets are migrated to the cloud, security becomes stretched, exposing businesses to potential cyber risks.

Not Enough Cybersecurity Talent

According to JupiterOne’s 2022 State of Cyber Assets Report (SCAR), the average modern cybersecurity team is responsible for 165,633 cyber assets including:

  • Cloud workloads
  • Devices
  • Network assets
  • Applications
  • Data assets
  • Users

The cloud computing revolution has outpaced the workforce. The average organization has over 500 cyber assets for every employee. Cybersecurity teams are overworked, understaffed, and underskilled, and often navigate a backlog of over 120,000 security findings.

Cyber Risks by the Numbers

In 2021, nearly 86 per cent of Canadian companies experienced at least one cyberattack. The average remediation cost of ransomware attacks in Canada is $1.92 million, slightly above the global $1.85 million average.

However, the good news is that Canada’s cybersecurity score is ranked thirteenth out of seventy-five countries. Tellingly, Canadian organizations are in the top five when it comes to full security automation deployment. Nearly a quarter of organizations have fully automated security, while almost forty per cent are partially automated.

Automated Cybersecurity

If there isn’t enough human cybersecurity talent to go around then automation will have to pick up the slack. Businesses will need to invest in cloud-native security tools that allow for automation and data-driven decision-making.

Automation will allow cybersecurity teams to work smarter, not harder. Not surprisingly, in a recent survey of security and cloud professionals, a whopping 95 per cent of respondents said that security automation would help them be more efficient.

Aside from the benefit of taking responsibilities out of the hands of security professionals and freeing up their time, automated security is also constantly running analyses and reports in the background faster than any manual process.

Automation also eliminates human error, which is the number one cause of cloud misconfigurations. Considering misconfigurations account for up to 70 per cent of security issues, this is a game-changer.

Let Us Help

With our expertise in cloud computing software like Microsoft Azure, SHEA can provide your business with the leadership and guidance you need during your digital transformation. Taking into account cyber risks, asset management, communications, confidentiality, networks, access, usability, and more, we will ensure your cloud-based infrastructure is secure and optimized.

To learn more, contact us at one of our offices around the globe or visit our website.