FireMon State of Hybrid Cloud Security Survey: Lack of Visibility, Speed of Cloud Business Initiatives Hamstring the Ability to Secure and Manage Hybrid Environments
60 percent of respondents say cloud business initiatives are accelerating faster than security teams’ ability to secure them
DALLAS (February 26, 2019) – FireMon today announced the results of its inaugural State of Hybrid Cloud Security Survey. The survey polled over 400 information security professionals, ranging from operations to c-level, about their practices maintaining network security across hybrid cloud environments. The survey aims to shed a light on the challenges security and network professionals face as they expand hybrid cloud initiatives.
Cloud Business and Cloud Security Misalignment
Cloud-based business initiatives are accelerating faster than security organizations’ ability to secure them. The 2019 State of Hybrid Cloud Security survey revealed 60 percent of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that this was happening in their organizations. In many cases, security personnel are not even included in cloud business initiatives.
Additional key findings include:
- Only 56 percent of respondents indicated that network security, security operations or security compliance teams are responsible for cloud security.
- In the remaining 44 percent of cases, IT/cloud teams, application owners or other teams outside the security organization are responsible for cloud security.
Similarly, the relationship between security and DevOps is inconsistent across organizations, which can impact the consistency of cloud security controls, as more enterprises deploy “as-a-Service” models in the cloud. In some cases, DevOps and security are fully aligned and working well together. In other cases, the relationship is difficult or even dysfunctional:
- 39 percent of respondents said they are using Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models concurrently.
- 7 percent of respondents said they are part of the DevOps team, as part of the emerging DevSecOps trend.
- However, 30 percent indicated their relationship with DevOps is either complicated, contentious, not worth mentioning or non-existent.
Existing Security Tools Can’t Handle Scale and Complexity
The 2019 State of Hybrid Cloud Security survey found that enterprises are inadvertently introducing complexity into their environments by deploying multiple solutions on-premise as well as across multiple private and public clouds. That complexity is compounded by a lack of integrated tools and training needed to holistically manage and secure hybrid cloud environments. Respondents also cited a lack of integration across tools, and lack of qualified personnel or insufficient training for using the tools, as key roadblocks to achieving cross-environment security management.
Key findings include:
- 59 percent of respondents use two or more different firewalls in their environment, with 67 percent also using two or more public cloud platforms.
- More than 80 percent of respondents are challenged with the limitations and complexity of security tools used for managing security across hybrid cloud environments.
- Only 28 percent of respondents said they were using tools that can work across multiple environments to manage network security.
- Almost 36 percent indicated using native tools for each environment or manual process, which means they are managing security in a stand-alone fashion within each component of a hybrid environment.
- 44.5 percent of respondents said their top three challenges for securing public cloud environments are: lack of visibility, lack of training and lack of control.
Mandate: Do More with Less
The transition to hybrid cloud environments has dramatically expanded the enterprise attack surface and, subsequently, the range of assets that must be secured, but security resources are not expanding at that same scale. Budget and staffing are the key resource constraints cited:
- 57.5 percent of respondents indicated that less than 25% of their security budget was dedicated to cloud security.
- 52 percent indicated they had security teams of 10 people or fewer.
“The results of our survey are compelling, but not surprising. In large, complex enterprise environments, budget constraints, lack of clarity around which team is responsible for cloud security, and the absence of standards for managing security across hybrid cloud environments are impairing organizations’ ability to secure their cloud business initiatives,” said FireMon Vice President of Technology Alliances Tim Woods. “This problem will only be solved with a new generation of security technologies and processes that fully integrate with DevOps and provide end-to-end visibility and continuous security and compliance across hybrid environments.”
Woods added that there is clear indication that many companies are no longer aligned to a central security policy or security doctrine that provides the necessary security guardrails across their hybrid environments. “In the absence of a concise security rule book, where departments are managing their own security controls, they will do so on a best-effort basis,” he said. “You can be guaranteed that this opens the door for increased risk. If decentralized security responsibility is the future for cloud-first strategies, and we believe it is, then we must look for a way to reestablish a global security management strategy that aligns business intent, with compliance intent, with security intent. Security implementations should closely reflect a central security doctrine. Security must be a component of application deployments where both are synchronized to each other.”
Read the FireMon State of Hybrid Cloud Security report here.
About FireMon
FireMon is the #1 network security management solution for hybrid cloud. FireMon delivers continuous security for multi-cloud enterprise environments through a powerful fusion of vulnerability management, compliance and orchestration. Since creating the first-ever network security policy management solution, FireMon has continued to deliver real-time visibility into and control over complex network security infrastructures, policies and risk postures for nearly 1,700 customers around the world. For more information, visit www.firemon.com and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
