2024 Thales Cloud Security Study Identifies Cloud Resources as the Biggest Targets for Cyberattacks in India

• Cloud Security spending now tops all other security spending categories
• In India, nearly half (46%) of respondents reported that all corporate data stored in the cloud is sensitive
• 37% of participating organisations have experienced a cloud data breach in India with 14% having had one in past year
• 35% of organisations in India recognise the importance of digital sovereignty initiatives as a means of future-proofing their cloud environments
• Globally, nearly half of organisations cite it is more difficult to manage compliance and privacy in the cloud vs. on-premises

Thales has announced the release of the 2024 Thales Cloud Security Study, its annual assessment on the latest cloud security threats, trends and emerging risks based on a survey of nearly 3000 IT and security professionals across 18 countries in 37 industries.

As the use of the cloud continues to be strategically vital to many organisations, cloud resources have become the biggest targets for cyber-attacks, with Cloud Storage (30%), SaaS applications (30%), and Cloud Management Infrastructure (28%) cited as the leading categories of attack in India. As a result, protecting cloud environments has risen as the top security priority ahead of all other security disciplines.

This comes as organisations continue to experience cloud data breaches. In India, thirty-seven percent of organisations have experienced a cloud data breach with 14% reported having an incident in the last 12 months. Human error and misconfiguration continued to lead the top root cause of these breaches (34%), followed by exploiting previously unknown vulnerabilities (32%), exploiting known vulnerabilities (21%) and failure to use Multi-Factor Authentication (11%).

Globally, growing cloud usage across enterprises has seen an accompanying growth in the potential attack surface for threat actors, with 66% of organisations using more than 25 SaaS applications and nearly half (47%) of corporate data being sensitive Despite the increased risks to sensitive data in the cloud, the data encryption rates remain low, with less than 9% of enterprises encrypting 80% or more of their sensitive cloud data.

As organisations gain more experience in using cloud computing, many have modernised their investments to meet new security challenges. For organisations that prioritised digital sovereignty as an emerging security concern, refactoring applications to logically separate, secure, store, and process cloud data was the top way they would attain or achieve sovereignty initiatives ahead of other measures such as repatriating workloads back to on-premises or in-territory. Future-proofing cloud environments (35%) was the number one driver behind digital sovereignty initiatives in India, while adhering to global privacy framework came in at a distant second at 20%. For more information listen to our webinar with S&P Global hosted by Scott Crawford, Information Security Research Head and Justin Lam, Research Analyst.  

About the 2024 Thales Cloud Security Study
The 2024 Thales Cloud Security Study was based on a global survey of 2961 respondent, aimed at professionals in security and IT management. In addition to criteria about level of knowledge on the general topic of the survey, the screening criteria for the survey excluded those respondents who indicated affiliation with organisations with annual revenue of less than US$100 million and with US$100 million-$250 million in selected countries. This research was conducted as an observational study and makes no causal claims.