The Increase In Cloud Platform Cyberattacks Could Be Good News For VARs

By Neal Bradbury, Senior Director of Business Development, Barracuda MSP

As more companies shift their IT infrastructure, data, and applications to the cloud, the need for reliable cloud security has become more acute. Fact is, the cloud has increasingly become a target for cyberattacks, as criminals follow the data from on-premises servers to cloud platforms.

According to a recent Security Intelligence Report from Microsoft, for example, attacks on the company’s Azure Cloud platform increased 300 percent in the first quarter of 2017. Further, A study by SkyHigh Networks found that 7 percent of Amazon’s S3 servers were exposed.

Multiple cybersecurity studies show that attackers are leveraging the expanding investment in the cloud to launch attacks even while more companies shift operations to private clouds, which are now utilized by a quarter of enterprises.

Part of the problem is that many companies don’t fully understand their own responsibility when it comes to cloud security. Public cloud providers are only responsible for protecting their own platforms — the physical and network infrastructure, and the virtualization layer. Customers still have to protect their data and applications, and must manage network security, access control, operating systems, data encryption, and other critical security elements.

But it’s difficult to shift on-premises security controls to cloud infrastructure. For companies using multiple public cloud services, there is an acute lack of cybersecurity expertise in most IT departments.

That lack of in-house expertise presents an opportunity for VARs: managing cloud security across the entire customer base.