Majority of EMEA companies still struggling to secure the Cloud

These findings are based on an independent survey of over 315 IT security professionals responsible for environments with significant investment in both cloud and on-premise IT infrastructure. The research covered two regions: U.S. and Canada, and Europe, The Middle East and Africa (EMEA). As part of the research, Sumo Logic found the following major differences between the U.S. and Canada and EMEA:

A larger majority of EMEA respondents take a different ownership approach to cloud security than they would for on-premises systems

• 41 percent of EMEA respondents stated that cloud requires a different approach to security management, compared to 31 percent in the U.S. and Canada

The need to investigate both application and infrastructure layers has changed as more companies have adopted Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

• 86 percent of EMEA respondents said that their priorities changed as IaaS adoption increased, while only 2 percent said it had dropped, and 12 percent said the level of investigation work would remain the same.

EMEA businesses are on the right path, but need to do a better job of integrating business, IT and security operations across the organisation

• Only 11 percent of EMEA companies involve both technology and C-level business roles in their security leadership team
• 26 percent have security leadership led solely by the IT security team, but sponsored by a C-level business role
• 42 percent have a mix of IT security, operations and other technology roles on the security leadership team, but do not involve business executives in decision-making
• Around 20 percent of companies have IT security solely managed and run by the IT security department

“One of the biggest takeaways from the findings is that European companies see the need to differentiate how they think about security for the cloud compared to their U.S. and Canadian counterparts,” said Mukesh Sharma, vice president, EMEA, Sumo Logic. “The growth of cloud demands more flexibility and agility around security, and many companies are struggling to adapt their legacy tools like SIEM for modern IT infrastructures.”

The report also revealed the following global trending data:

Security in the cloud is creating new challenges and a need for collaboration

• 63 percent say cloud requires broader technical expertise to understand threats
• 54 percent say greater cross-team coordination is necessary for security in their cloud environment
• 51 percent say overloaded staff is a challenge for security in their cloud environment

New models are needed to break down silos of people, workflow, and technology

• 95 percent say organisational changes would help improve security for their cloud environment
• 57 percent say increased collaboration between IT operations and security operations would help improve security for their cloud environment
• 64 percent say a tool that is able to consolidate other tool capabilities would help improve security for their cloud environment

Organisations are modernising IT infrastructures, applications and processes

• 64 percent think the overall industry is moving towards a consolidation of DevSecOps
• 76 percent of organisations are adopting DevOps, while only 56% of organisations are adopting DevSecOps

New technology approaches always require new approaches to security. As more companies migrate to the cloud, development, operations and security teams need to adapt to this new approach within their own processes. The report findings underscore the need for a new class of converged operations and security solutions, integrating application insight and infrastructure defence together. As more companies adopt DevOps processes, the impact on security will be felt more strongly over time.

“As more organisations continue to adopt cloud infrastructure, they are also facing more regulatory pressure than ever, with new laws like GDPR, to preserve not only the privacy and security of their own architectures, but also the data of their customers and end-users,” said Sharma. “The findings validate the need for an integrated DevSecOps approach in order to build a security and privacy by design program that enables organisations to leverage their machine data to spot potential gaps around security and stop them from becoming compliance risks for the business.”