A chart shows the top reasons organizations don't have cloud firewall security
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — A report by cloud security provider Dome9 Security (www.dome9.com) and research firm Ponemon Institute (www.ponemon.org) found that 67 percent of IT security respondents said their organization is vulnerable because cloud ports and firewalls are not adequately secured.
The study, “Cloud Security: Managing Firewall Risks” was independently conducted by the Ponemon Institute and was sponsored by Dome9 Security.
Dome9 says that the research was conducted to determine the challenges organizations face when managing access and securing firewalls and ports in cloud environments.
The study analyzed responses from 682 IT and IT security practitioners in the US working in organizations that use hosted or cloud servers. According to Dome9, on average respondents have more than 10 years of IT security experience and 40 percent come from organizations with 5,000 employees or more.
According to the report, 54 percent of respondents said that organizations’ IT personnel are not knowledgeable or have no knowledge about the potential risk of open firewall ports in their cloud environments.
“We believe this is the first study to look at the risk to cloud security because of unsecured ports and firewalls, and the results are very revealing,” Dr. Larry Ponemon, founder and chairman of the Ponemon Institute said in a statement. “It is commonly accepted that organizations believe they struggle with security in the cloud, but this study gets to a root of the problem. For example, more than half of the respondents said it is very likely or likely that administrative cloud server ports left open for access expose the organization to increased hacker attacks and security exploits. Nineteen percent say these exploits have already happened.”
Nearly half of respondents said that they would not know if their organizations’ applications or data was compromised by a security exploit or data breach by an open port on a cloud server.
Most respondents said that being able to efficiently manage security in the cloud is as important as cloud security itself, and believe that the cloud server firewall is the first place to stop attacks and prevent exploits. Automation is also a key factor to cloud firewall policy management according to 72 percent of respondents. 78 percent of respondents say the most important feature to cloud server security is the ability to close ports.
“It’s common knowledge that security is the top inhibitor to wide-scale cloud adoption, but thanks to this study, for the first time we’re able to hone in on exactly why that is,” Dave Meizlik, Dome9 VP of marketing and business development. “Security in the cloud needs to be as elastic as the cloud – if it’s not scalable and manageable then it’s not going to be effective. And the front-line defense, the firewall, is neither scalable nor manageable for most cloud users and service providers, leaving their cloud servers vulnerable to attack.”
Recently, the WHIR did a Q&A interview with Meizlik about Dome9′s multi-platform security management service.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson writes full-time for the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, and has been writing for the WHIR since September 2010. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
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