Cloud security is step zero
Cloud security needs to be viewed as the foundation upon which an organization builds its FinOps initiative. Fundamentally, strong cloud security reduces cloud costs by reducing the likelihood of fraud and breaches, and monitoring containers and cloud workloads for misconfigurations. This reduces risk while optimizing costs – two fundamental aspects of FinOps.
When finance and engineering teams work together toward a shared business-driven goal, they can leverage the power of the cloud while gaining notable cost benefits. Let’s break down a few security-related functionalities a bit further.
Risk Management
According to the Cost of a Data Breach 2020 report, the average total cost of a data breach was $3.86 million and lost business accounted for 40%, or $1.52 million, of that amount. Meanwhile, expenditures that reduced the average costs included:
- Incident response testing: $295,267
- AI platform: $259,354
- Managed security services: $78,054
Understanding risks and mitigating them not only reduces the likelihood that an organization will experience a costly data breach, but it also reduces the costs of an incident. Getting a comprehensive cloud roadmap, such as the one offered through Managed Cloud Services, can reduce risk in daily cloud operations.
Fraud Prevention
Fraud prevention controls can also contribute to cost savings. Before deploying a cloud strategy, the FinOps team needs to consider risks like:
- Credential theft
- Malicious internal access misuse
- Conflicts of interest
In cloud-based stacks, Identity and Access Management (IAM) controls reduce data breach and fraud risks. Limiting access according to the principle of least privilege and setting segregation of duties controls can also reduce malicious and accidental access misuse.
Organizations need to ensure that they continuously incorporate the cost of solutions for these cloud security tools when setting their budgets.
Misconfiguration Prevention
According to the 2020 Data Breach Investigations report, data breaches caused by misconfigured cloud resources increased by 4.9% year-over-year from 2019, with misconfigurations being one of the top five threat action varieties for the year.
Resources like containers and cloud-based workloads pose a data breach risk. Ultimately, this means that when factoring these risks into making a cloud migration decision, organizations need to consider them as a potential cost.
Securing cloud workloads with a service like SoftwareOne’s Cloud Workload Security enables organizations to protect cloud assets in multi-cloud and hybrid environments, including Azure, AWS, and on-premises architectures. Mitigating data breach risks by securing APIs and user interfaces while ensuring appropriate IAM controls enables organizations to leverage the cloud’s scalability without compromising security.