Cloud

Over the last few years in enterprise IT, the fight between on-premise software and cloud services has been dominating tech conversations. Today, many businesses realize we will never return to the in-office routine we experienced before the pandemic. As remote and hybrid work becomes the norm, constituents now expect to be communicated through various channels, including mobile.

The introduction of mobile-focused operations showcases the need for technology system improvements within the public sector.

Cloud use is commonplace among large enterprises, with 82 percent of organizations with $1B or more in revenue using three or more clouds, up from 66 percent last year.

However, with the majority of companies (70 percent) using two or more identity systems, 75 percent of respondents say they lack the ability to easily discover all existing access policies, according to a new study conducted by Osterman Research for Strata Identity.

Cloud costs are a measure of the services businesses are using, but they also reflect the wider market and the pricing strategies of providers.

Cloud native service provider Civo has carried out a survey into what businesses are spending on cloud and finds that enterprise cloud costs have risen by 93 percent on average in the past year.

More and more workloads are being shifted to the cloud and a new report from Tigera shows that 75 percent of companies are focusing development on cloud-native applications.

But this increased development and deployment of cloud-native applications also creates the need for more advanced observability and security capabilities.

The Log4Shell vulnerability proved to be one of the major cybersecurity events of last year and its repercussions continue to rumble on.

Research from network security platform Valtix shows 95 percent of IT leaders say Log4Shell was a wake up call for cloud security, changing it permanently, and 87 percent feel less confident about their cloud security now than they did before the incident.

As enterprises have moved to make their systems more accessible to hybrid working during the pandemic, they have increasingly been turning to cloud-based solutions.

But this rapid growth of cloud infrastructure leads to problems managing and optimizing cloud resources. Which is why cloud networking company Alkira is launching a free tool to expose shadow IT and recommend ways to secure, optimize, and boost cloud deployments.

Ask security professionals to name the biggest threat to their organizations' cloud environments, and most won’t hesitate to give a one-word answer: misconfigurations. Technically, they’re not incorrect, yet they’re defining "misconfiguration" much too narrowly. They’re likely thinking of an Amazon S3 bucket that’s left exposed or a misconfigured security group rule. While identifying and remediating misconfigurations must be a priority, it’s important to understand that misconfigurations are but one means to the ultimate end for attackers: control plane compromise, which has played a central role in every major cloud breach to date.

Considering the steady cadence of news headlines tying cloud breaches to misconfigurations over the last several years, it’s understandable that finding and fixing misconfigurations has been the primary focus of security professionals and their solutions vendors.

While 72 percent of respondents to a new survey expect that the majority of their apps will be created using cloud-native development by 2023, only 47 percent of them say they know a lot about it.

The survey of over 500 IT leaders and developers across industries, carried out for low-code development specialist OutSystems, shows that selecting the right tools/platforms (52 percent), and architectural complexity (51 percent) are the top two challenges, even for those currently using cloud-native.

Attackers are finding new ways to target cloud-native environments according to a new report from Aqua Security's Nautilus threat research team.

While cryptominers are the most common malware observed, with increasing frequency researchers have discovered an increased usage of backdoors, rootkits and credential stealers.

The ransomware threat is very real with attacks growing in size and frequency, in part, because of the acceleration of digital transformation initiatives and the move to embrace digital services as well as the rapid implementation of hybrid ways of working.

As new digital systems required multiple access points for customers, partners, and employees, this has created a vastly expanded attack surface. This has hastened the rise in ransomware attacks, as attackers quickly took advantage of the increased number of possible attack vectors. 

Over 50 percent of DevOps professionals and leaders say their cloud service provider is already a competitive threat to their B2B or B2C business or is expected to become one according to new research.

The study, carried out for cloud provider Linode, by Techstrong Research surveyed over 500 development professionals, managers and senior managers across 20 industries, and finds 75 percent say that their IT infrastructure will be cloud-based by the end of this year.

A new report from Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), sponsored by Keepit, shows that granular and air-gapped backup are critical to data recovery when businesses are hit by ransomware.

Of more than 600 respondents to the survey, 79 percent have experienced a ransomware attack within the last year, with 17 percent experiencing attacks weekly and 13 percent daily.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a technology leapfrog beyond anything we’ve seen in decades. But now that we’ve made this leap is there any going back? And do we have the right technology for enterprises to keep up with new demands?

According to Pew Research, as of around two years into the pandemic, roughly 60 percent of U.S. workers who say their jobs can mainly be done from home (59 percent) are working from home. Our research found that digital experiences like online gaming, streaming and telehealth increased dramatically during the early days pandemic. And now, technologies and experiences like cloud gaming caught on during the pandemic are exploding. 

A Business Continuity Plan is, broadly speaking, a set of processes and principles to improve resilience and ensure a business can continue functioning. Due to the importance of IT to productivity for almost every organization in the 21st century -- downtime, when IT systems are offline, is its antithesis.

Thanks to the rapid adoption of digital tools spurred on by the pandemic and the general move to online we have seen throughout the world, there is a tremendous amount of risk out there for businesses with online assets, from cyberattacks and ransomware to natural disasters and power outages. However, using cloud-based IT assets such as remote desktops, SaaS applications, and cloud storage of data can be a shortcut to protecting their continuity -- and therefore the continuity of your business.

What’s the optimal way to manage cloud finances, one of the core disciplines of a FinOps practice?

The answer largely relies on automating efforts, but many FinOps practitioners haven’t taken full advantage of opportunities available to them or of the savings available to their organizations. According to a report from the FinOps Foundation, a Linux Foundation non-profit trade association focused on codifying and promoting cloud financial management best practices and standards, nearly half (49 percent) of the more than 800 respondents (with a collective $30+ billion in annual cloud spend) had little or no automation of cloud spend management.