How Cloud Compliance Risks and Misconfiguration Can Affect Your Business

Cloud Compliance and Security

About 94 percent of businesses recorded better cybersecurity after switching to the cloud. Ninety-one percent feel that the cloud has made it easier to comply with government requirements.

Cloud infrastructure is generally more compliant and secure than on-premise deployments. With the right solution, you can unearth and get rid of risks in the cloud.

However, the cloud isn’t perfect. Digital transformations are fast-paced and generally aggressive. They increase the risk of vulnerabilities and misconfiguration. Usually, the issues result from misunderstanding the Shared Responsibility Model.

While your cloud provider is responsible for cloud security, you are still responsible for controlling and managing it. Your provider will only handle the underlying infrastructure. You remain responsible for all traffic, data, applications, and traffic.

This is where cloud misconfiguration is likely to happen. Here are a few ways that cloud compliance risks and misconfiguration can affect your business.

Causing Data Breaches

Cloud misconfiguration is likely to cause data breaches. In fact, misconfiguration causes 80 percent of data breaches. Businesses may find it difficult to determine if users have too much access permission in their environments. Therefore, you may not find out that there is a problem until it is too late.

According to a famous Gartner quote, almost all cloud failures result from human error. He states that human errors will cause 99 percent of cloud failures until 2025.

Because of the complicated nature of the cloud, employees may not realize that they are allowing access to restricted areas. Even if your company uses cloud vendor tools for Identity and Access Management, there will be gaps.

Cybersecurity and DevOps Won’t Work as One

During the build stage, security procedures must be implemented to mitigate the risk of cloud security misconfiguration. Security and DevOps have to work in collaboration.

The approach, known as ‘Shift Left,’ is the surest way to promote speed in the cloud environment without making it riskier.

Cloud Compliance Risks Can be Difficult to Fix

Fixing cloud compliance risks and misconfiguration issues can be very difficult. There is no one-time fix. The cloud environment is dynamic. What seems secure today won’t necessarily be secure tomorrow.

Factors like the DevOps pipeline, employee turnover, and software updates constantly change. It could be impossible to manage them manually.

Challenges of Creating a Cloud Environment Without Cloud Misconfiguration

Configuring a cloud environment can be difficult regardless of how experienced you may be. There is limited standardization between various platforms, architectures, and applications. You need skills to learn about load balancing, security, networking, and optimization before completing a project.

Luckily, cloud misconfiguration is an avoidable problem. Start with learning how to configure various default settings, tools, and policies to control your assets with the best practices.

You must know how to manage everything under the Shared Responsibility Model. Every member of the organization needs to understand their role.

A single mistake could subject you to a data breach or cyber-attack. Unfortunately, you may not notice cloud misconfigurations until an attack happens.

Cloud Compliance Risks and Misconfiguration Can Affect Your Business

Cloud compliance risks and misconfiguration issues are common when using the cloud. However, they can have devastating effects. In most cases, you won’t detect them until it is too late.

These issues leave you susceptible to data breaches. They can be difficult to fix without professional help. Take advantage of modern solutions to determine and fix issues on the cloud before it is too late.