Increase in cyberthreats from cloud data storage flagged

Majority of companies in Asia-Pacific, including the Philippines, expressed concerns over the potential cyber risks given the greater adoption of cloud infrastructure as they make their operations more efficient, according to a survey by cybersecurity management firm Tenable.

In a recent study, Tenable revealed that 70 percent of cybersecurity teams in the region had flagged the same worries over cloud-related digital threats. This is higher than Latin America with 66 percent; Europe, Middle East and Africa, 64 percent; and the United States, 62 percent.

This stemmed from a finding that 57 percent of the respondents claimed to have “a lack of data hygiene in user data and vulnerability management systems.”

“A critical organizational gap highlighted in the study is the delayed involvement of cybersecurity teams in cloud service selection and deployment processes, with only 31 percent of Asia Pacific teams being consulted early enough,” it added.

Cloud technology has been supporting hybrid work setup, a trend that has risen during the pandemic after mobility had been heavily curtailed. It makes documents, files and applications readily available for employees via devices like laptops, smartphones and tables.

With employees accessing devices outside of office premises, attack surface for cyber criminals have gotten bigger as this provides more potential entry points for digital threats.

Among the cyberattacks targeting enterprises is business email compromise, whereby hackers send emails embedded with suspicious links to business emails of company employees. It seeks to trick employees into providing access to the corporate information technology system. “The evolving complexity of cloud infrastructures demands a proactive security posture. By anticipating and addressing vulnerabilities before they can be exploited, organizations can significantly enhance their resilience against cyber threats,” said Nigel Ng, vice president for Asia-Pacific and Japan at Tenable.

“This shift is not just about technology; it’s about transforming the way we think about and manage cloud security,” he added.

Walter So, country manager for cloud computing company VMWare, told Inquirer in an earlier interview the trend now among companies is the use of a multicloud approach, which includes public and private cloud usage.

Google GCP, Microsoft Azure, Oracle, Alibaba AliCloud and Amazon AWS are public cloud vendors providing data storage as a service and charging clients on a regular basis, usually per month. Private cloud, meanwhile, refers to a company’s own infrastructure supporting existing networks, which can be less costly but firms should also take into consideration spending on technology management and upgrade, among others.

According to a study by Alibaba, 91 percent of the Philippine companies are likely to increase investment in cloud this year to better handle their workloads.