Expert: The cloud is more secure than on-prem, but the speed of adoption is making it less so

Companies are accelerating their use of the cloud, but should slow down and make sure security is built in from the beginning.

TechRepublic’s Karen Roby spoke with Ron Bennatan, general manager for data security at Imperva, a cybersecurity company, about cybersecurity in the cloud. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Ron Bennatan: We all know that the transformation, the move to cloud, the move of the workloads to the cloud, I mean, it’s something that’s been happening for the last five years and more. It’s just accelerating like crazy. It’s accelerating because the cloud just allows businesses to go so much faster and solve so many issues. It got even a further acceleration with COVID. It’s very, very clear. You can see how companies are driving, through incentives, moving everything into the cloud. I think what we’re also seeing is that there’s more complexity as that is happening, because it’s just new. Anything new is something that people will just have less experience with.

And one of the hardest things is to deal with that complexity, and the cloud gives you so many options and so much freedom and so much flexibility that it’s great to drive business, but it’s not always clear whether all the security controls are catching up as quickly as they should be with that transformation and the workloads going in the cloud. It’s always hard when you see all these stats to say, is this correlation or is this causality? But I’m not sure it matters that much. I mean, if we’re driving everything to the cloud, we need to make sure that the security controls are going with the data into the cloud, not coming two years later.

Karen Roby: When we talk about the number of leaks, the number of incidents, I mean, it’s going up significantly.

Ron Bennatan: We’re seeing a very large increase. I think some of it is related to that complexity. Some of it is related to sophistication of the attacks. I keep hearing about, “When are we going to stop seeing leaky buckets?” It is not that the cloud infrastructure is less secure. It’s actually more secure, in my opinion. It’s far more secure because it’s standardized, it’s clear, it’s well documented. It’s just, we’re doing things really, really fast. And so this increase that we’re seeing is natural. It’s addressable. I don’t think anybody should be really surprised about it. And it is addressable, which is also good.