It’s clear that 2020 was the tipping point. For the first time, IDC's security surveys showed that the amount of corporate data in the cloud surpassed the amount of corporate data on premises. Additionally, the majority of compute now lives in the cloud, as 53% of workloads are found in IaaS.

Regrettably, hackers are following the data to the cloud; over the past two years, a typical organization has experienced 2 cloud breaches that required "significant extra resources to rectify.”[1] Much like breaches in on-premises environments, breaches in IaaS cloud environments are the result of numerous factors, including:

• Advanced malware (17.7%)
• Lack of sufficient security tools (17.7%)
• Compromised credentials (14.6%)
• Misconfiguration of IaaS environment (14.3%)
• Unpatched vulnerability (13.9%)
• Insider threat (13.3%)
• Zero-day vulnerability (8.5%)

The moral of the story: As the market transitions to the cloud, hackers also moved their focus to the cloud, so we must be diligent in ensuring the security of data. This isn't to say that cloud-related technologies and new ways of communicating are the root cause of breaches and business failures; rather, it's to say that as businesses adopt new technologies, their protection strategies must change to keep pace. These strategies must include stronger and more varied security mechanisms, but they must also include ways to recover quickly should a breach or an incident occur.

All over the world, enterprises are steadily making their way through digital transformation (DX) — the process of integrating technology with all aspects of the business to accelerate business activities, support agility, and capitalize on strategic vision and dynamic opportunities. A key element of DX is becoming a data-centric organization capable of monetizing information.

At the same time, DX inherently brings with it new risks that may have been previously unforeseen or that may have complicated the risk profile of well-established business processes. As a result, enterprises seek higher levels of integration between key business support functions and greater data availability to ensure that the business is ready to withstand any challenge. This is cyber-resilience.

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[1] IDC's Cloud Security Survey, December 2019