9 in 10 S’porean businesses cite improving cloud security as key priority

This is due to a cloud breach that could halt business operations. 

Almost all (95%) Singaporean organisations cite improving cloud security will be a key priority over the next year, as more than half of IT and security leaders believe that cloud breach would make normal operations impossible, according to Illumio’s Cloud Security Index

“Attackers can’t paralyse critical operations without spreading across a network first, so breach containment and preventing lateral movement has to be the priority,” said Andrew Kay, director of systems engineering APJ, Illumio.

In the event of a cloud breach, more than one quarter (26%) of Singaporean IT and security leaders say it would be easy for an attacker to find weaknesses in their organisations’ environment and move laterally, as they have limited or no controls in place to limit network discovery or lateral movement, or have a limited amount of preventative and detective controls. 

Only 35% are confident they have excellent preventative controls in place, making it very difficult for attackers to find vulnerabilities.

Cloud technology affords organisations the ability to scale and innovate; however, traditional security tools are holding Singaporean businesses back in both respects. 

Almost all (96%) of organisations in Singapore believe they need security that better scales with the speed of cloud adoption, whilst 74% of IT and security decision makers also believe the security function slows down cloud adoption in their organisation.

Security and development teams are on the frontlines when it comes to curbing the repercussions of cloud breaches; however, the the study revealed that much work needs to best equip them for success. 

Nearly half (48%) of local respondents said their business needs to improve collaboration between security and application developers. 

Meanwhile, 99% of IT and security decision makers in Singapore believe they need to make it easier for DevOps teams to adopt cloud security best practices, and 91% believe reducing workloads and increasing efficiency for SecOps teams needs improvement.