Report: Cloud Infrastructure More Susceptible to Cyberattacks, Say CISOs

Your CISO may be giving you a call to send budget for cloud infrastructure security your way. Here's why: When asked how vulnerable their organizations are to impending cyberattacks, 66% of the surveyed CISOs said their organizations remain vulnerable to a certain degree and among the affected digital environments identified, cloud infrastructure (39%) was the third most susceptible to cyberattacks while on-prem workloads were the least (14%).

However, even with the acclaimed advantages cloud solutions have over on-prem data storage solutions, only 28 CISOs of the 200 surveyed consider it a cyber vulnerability. This is largely due to the distinct security structure adopted for each option: cloud infrastructure is less prohibitive and expensive when compared to on-prem servers. Despite this, several reports reveal the partial (and in some cases, complete) abandonment of on-prem servers in favor of cloud computing and this is predicted to continue. 

Storage Demands Fuel Data Center Security Risks

As the global information infrastructure continues to advance, the need to improve data storage and processing capabilities has never been more crucial. The good news is that enterprises aren’t lagging in this responsibility and the predicted $83.91 billion growth of the data center server market from 2020 to 2025 proves it. However, the bad news is that data center security risks still persist. With adversaries posing numerous threats to IT infrastructure — including physical infrastructure — cybersecurity leaders have their hands full with pervasive attacks.

Undoubtedly, these developments impact organizations in many ways — from how IT leaders protect their critical infrastructure, to what types of applications make inroads into their companies and even how they spend money. But just how much are enterprise IT leaders spending on data center servers, what factors are driving these spending decisions, and how do these fit into today’s most compelling data center security trends?

Nuspire, a managed security services provider (MSSP), conducted an anonymous survey of the top buying trends of over 200 CISOs and IT leaders from large to mid-sized companies in the U.S and some of the survey’s findings provide insights into the factors driving the buying decisions of IT leaders. Selected across a wide variety of industries, the “Top CISO Buying Trends of 2022” report inquires into the key drivers of CISOs activities and the priorities, motivations and direction of outsourced spend. 

Outsourcing IT Needs Impacts Data Center Server Functionality

Another interesting finding from the survey is that most information security leaders outsource their needs, with the migration of enterprise assets to the cloud among the top 10 outsourced services. Despite being outsourced, cloud migration was still considered a top security risk due to the vulnerabilities involved in the transfer process. Regardless, outsourcing data center management has been proven to have a distinct effect on the functionality of workloads on both on-prem and cloud data center servers.