Security breaches of cloud-stored data are inevitable, Australians believe

Breaches of cloud-stored data on average cost a business $4.9m, and more than 60 per cent of Australians believe security is lacking, the results of a global survey have found.

Illumio head of industry solutions Raghu Nandakumara

Cloud breaches on average cost a business $4.9m, and more than 60 per cent of Australian security workers believe security is insufficient.

About 96 per cent of Australian organisations say their most sensitive data is stored in the cloud, an area nine in 10 cyber security workers say risks being breached due to unnecessary or unauthorised activity.

Those are the findings of a new global study conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of US data centre business Illumio.

The results comprised responses from 1600 IT and security leaders across the globe, many whom were in senior roles. While the research was conducted globally, about one eighth of responded were from Australia.

Illumio’s head of industry solutions, Raghu Nandakumara, said there were some interesting findings from Australia, which shares a more sceptical view than other nations when it comes to cyber breaches.

Recent event have resulted in Australian businesses not only believing cyber breaches are something that could happen but rather that it will happen, Mr Nandakumara said.

“There’s an ‘assume breach’ mentality. (Australians) assume that an unexpected event will happen where an attacker is going to make it into the internal environment, whether through some kind of, like, initial incursion, a phishing or social engineer incident,” he said.

About 60 per cent of them believe that cyber security breaches are inevitable, according to the data. Comparatively, just 26 per cent of security chiefs across the world believe that.

That was interesting to Mr Nandakumara, who said that there may be some paranoia surrounding the security of cloud services.

Australian security workers may not always realise that the security of cloud services is a shared responsibility, he said.

“The reason for that is in cloud environments every data, every resource, every, every workload is literally one misconfiguration away from being accessible over the internet,” he said.

“So organisations are obviously super concerned and that risk is kind of what really drives the paranoia around cloud security.”

While cloud security was front of mind for most, Mr Nandakumara said it was often adequate and that there may be another reason Australian security workers had high concerns. That came down to visibility, he said.

“As a result of sort of knowing that they’ve got that gap in their visibility and that limited ability to control sort of access, they’re obviously concerned about any of these type of attacks,” he said.