According to new research from Thales, almost half (49%) of
businesses believe cloud apps make them a target for cyber-attacks.
Surveying 1,050 IT decision makers globally, Thales’
2019 Access Management Index1 revealed that
cloud applications (49%) are listed in the top three reasons an
organization might be attacked, just behind unprotected infrastructure
such as IoT devices (54%) and web portals (50%).
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here:
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190708005443/en/
2019 Access Management Index (Photo: Thales)
With cloud applications now a crucial part of day-to-day business
operations, the majority (97%) of IT leaders believe that cloud access
management is necessary to continue their cloud adoption. However,
despite four in 10 (38%) organizations appointing a CISO due to concerns
over data breaches in the past 12 months, and 79% of IT decision makers
stating that CISOs are responsible for selecting the solutions their
company has in place, just one in 10 (14%) are given the final decision
on cloud access management. In fact, companies are more likely to put
their faith in a traditional IT role, CIOs (48%) when dealing with this,
suggesting a disconnection between the decision-making and
implementation surrounding cloud security.
“Thales protects our customers’ business by enabling them to securely
access and use cloud applications. The 2019 Thales Access Management
Index findings clearly show concerns surrounding cyber-attacks when
deploying cloud applications. Trusted accesss to the cloud is key
to our customers’ digital transformation, but without adequate
investment in a dedicated CISO office, organizations will lack the
leadership required to implement the correct security strategy or
solutions to keep them secure in the cloud,” says Tina Stewart, vice
president market strategy for cloud protection and licensing activity at
Thales.
Breaches bringing changes
Positively, the growing awareness of consumer data breaches has led to
organizations taking action; almost all (94%) have changed their
security policies around access management in the last 12 months. What’s
more, the biggest areas of changes have focused around: staff training
on security and access management (52%); increasing spend on access
management (45%), and access management becoming a board priority (44%).
Obstacles blocking access management
In spite of the updates to security policies, the majority of IT leaders
(95%) believe ineffective cloud access management is still a concern for
their organization. In fact, their biggest concerns are its impact on
security (48%), IT staffs’ time (44%) and on operational overheads and
IT costs (43%). Worse, when it comes to implementing access management
solutions, they cited costs (40%), human error (39%) and difficulty
integrating them (36%) as the biggest obstacles.
When it comes to cloud solutions, three-quarters (75%) of organizations
already rely on access management to secure their external users’ logins
to online corporate resources. In particular, two-factor authentication
is the most likely (58%) tool to be seen as effective at protecting
cloud and web-based apps, followed by smart single sign-on (49%) and
biometric authentication (47%).
Stewart concludes: “While organizations are getting to
grips with access management solutions, IT and business decision makers
must ensure they understand the risks to their cloud solutions in order
to implement the relevant ones. These solutions must be perimeter-free,
compatible with a zero-trust model and flexible and adaptive in order to
make the most of the latest technologies such as Smart SSO. Without
effective access management tools in place organizations face a higher
risk of breaches, a lack of visibility and incur extra costs from poorly
optimized cloud.”
For more information, attend our Global
Trends in Cloud Access Management, Single Sign On and Authentication
taking place on July 25th or visit the 2019
Thales Access Management Index.
About Thales
The people we all rely on to make the world go round – they rely on
Thales. Our customers come to us with big ambitions: to make life
better, to keep us safer. Combining a unique diversity of expertise,
talents and cultures, our architects design and deliver extraordinary
high technology solutions. Solutions that make tomorrow possible, today.
From the bottom of the oceans to the depth of space and cyberspace, we
help our customers think smarter and act faster – mastering ever greater
complexity and every decisive moment along the way. With 80,000
employees in 68 countries, Thales reported sales of €19 billion in 2018.
PLEASE VISIT
Thales
Group
Security
Download
HD photos
1The 2019 Access Management Index, is a survey of 1050
executives in 11 countries with responsibility for, or influence over,
IT and data security. The survey, reporting and analysis was conducted
by Vanson
Bourne, commissioned by Thales.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190708005443/en/