Ermetic Reports Nearly 100% of Companies Experienced A Cloud Data Breach In Past 18 Months

Ermetic, the cloud infrastructure security company, today announced the results of a research study conducted by global market intelligence firm IDC which found that 98% of the companies surveyed had experienced at least one cloud data breach in the past 18 months compared to 79% last year. Meanwhile, 67% reported three or more such breaches, and 63% said they had sensitive data exposed.

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.@ErmeticSec survey by IDC finds nearly 100% of companies experienced a cloud data breach in past 18 months with 63% of organizations experiencing exposure of sensitive data

According to the 200 CISOs and other security decision makers who participated in the survey, nearly 60% consider lack of visibility as well as inadequate identity and access management a major threat to their cloud infrastructure. They cited access risk and infrastructure security among their top cloud security priorities for the next 18 months. Meanwhile, 85% of organizations said they plan to increase their security spending this year, with a significant portion being allocated to cloud infrastructure security.

A full copy of the report is available here.

“Even though nearly 70% of companies invest more than 25 hours a week on cloud identity management, the survey found that 83% had at least one access-related cloud data breach,” said Shai Morag, CEO of Ermetic. “In fact, almost 60% of organizations said they consider lack of visibility and inadequate IAM security a major threat to their cloud infrastructure.”

An effective cloud infrastructure security strategy must focus on identities, permissions and entitlements to truly protect against risk. While many companies are using commercial — and even free — cloud provider tools to address their cloud security needs, these typically lack granular visibility and analytic capabilities. As a result, they are unable to capture and unravel the privileges attached to human and machine identities, and lack the automation needed to remediate problems at scale and implement least privilege.

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Survey Highlights

As part of the study commissioned by Ermetic, IDC surveyed 200 senior IT security decision makers in the US across the Banking & Insurance (13%), Healthcare (11%), Pharmaceuticals (12%), Manufacturing (11%), Retail (11%), Software Development (11%) and other (31%) sectors. Organizations ranged in size from 1,500 to more than 20,000 employees. Some of the report’s key findings include:

• 98% of companies in the survey experienced a cloud data breach in the past 18 months, compared to 79% last year; while 67% reported three or more incidents
• 63% of respondents said their organization had sensitive data exposed in the cloud, this number ballooned to 85% for companies with annual cloud infrastructure budgets of $50M or more
• 83% of enterprises reported that at least one of their cloud breaches was related to access
• Access risk and cloud infrastructure security rank among the top five security priorities for companies in the next 18 months
• Nearly 70% of companies spend more than 25 hours per week managing IAM in cloud infrastructure
• 71% of organizations use commercial security tools offered by cloud providers, and reported that these tools require a lot of time. Only 20% of organizations said they are very satisfied with their cloud security posture.
• 92% of companies said they tried, are trying or will try to implement least privilege in the cloud in the next 12 months
• 50% of large organizations reported they are struggling to implement least privilege. All cited their greatest barriers as too difficult and time consuming (29%), lack of personnel/expertise (29%) or multi-clouds (29%)