Evolving platform scene
The complexity of the modern security landscape cannot be overstated. While cloud platforms offer powerful business transformation capabilities, they also create new challenges for security professionals. Many organizations find themselves struggling to balance the competing demands of innovation and security, especially when some data must remain on-premises due to regulatory or operational requirements.
The landscape is becoming increasingly complex due to the convergence of multiple technologies. Bernard Montiel, EMEA technical director and security strategist at Tenable, points to the intersection of IT, cloud, operational technology (OT) and the Internet of Things (IoT) as a defining feature of modern infrastructure. This convergence creates what security experts call the “toxic cloud triad” — publicly exposed, highly vulnerable, and highly privileged workloads. Alarmingly, 38% of organizations globally have cloud workloads that meet all of these criteria, creating a perfect storm of potential vulnerabilities.
The pressure on security teams is enormous and increasing. According to Montel, 58% of cybersecurity teams are too busy combatting critical incidents to take a preventive approach to reduce their organization's vulnerability to attacks. This reactive stance is becoming increasingly unacceptable as threats evolve and proliferate, forcing organizations to reconsider their approach to security operations.
The volume of security data presents its own challenges. “The amount of data that can be collected from security toolkits and adjacent threat detection tools is enormous,” explains Shourd. “Security operations teams need a greater understanding of business priorities to ensure that relevant and impactful threat issues are monitored within available tool budgets, which often do not scale with the scale of requirements.” The mismatch between security needs and available resources creates a significant challenge for organizations of all sizes.
Identity management has emerged as a critical battleground in this new security landscape. “Identities in particular are a major threat in cloud environments since they are the keys to accessing these resources,” Montiel asserts. “If compromised, it enables attackers to access everything, especially sensitive data and systems.” While simple actions like keeping credentials private can make a big difference, comprehensive security requires a more sophisticated approach that takes into account the full scope of identity management in cloud environments.
Major cloud providers are responding to these challenges with increasingly sophisticated platforms. “Major cloud providers have created their own generative AI platforms that include their own models and also allow for the integration of open source models,” Hellman points out. Microsoft and Google are leading the way with cutting-edge multimedia models, although these solutions come with ongoing consumption charges that organizations must carefully factor into their security budgets.
