Vectra AI has released the findings of its new PaaS and IaaS Security Survey Report. The report presents the results of a survey of 317 IT executives all using AWS, 70 percent coming from organizations of 1,000+ employees. The findings show a rapid expansion and reliance on AWS services while simultaneously showcasing security blind spots within many organizations.
As digital transformation efforts continue, AWS is becoming an even more critical component to organizations. They are regularly deploying new workloads, leveraging deployments in multiple regions, and are relying on more than one AWS service.
The survey found that:
- 64 percent of DevOps respondents are deploying new workload services weekly or even more frequently
- 78 percent of organizations are running AWS across multiple regions (40 percent in at least three)
- 71 percent of respondents say that they are using more than four AWS services (such as S3, EC2, IAM, etc.)
The expansion of AWS services has naturally led to increased complexity and risk says the report. All of the companies surveyed have experienced at least one security incident in their public cloud environment in the last 12 months. Some blind spots the Vectra report highlights include:
- 30 percent of organizations surveyed have no formal sign-off before pushing to production
- 40 percent of respondents say they do not have a DevSecOps workflow
- 71 percent of organizations say that 10 or more people can modify the entire infrastructure in their AWS environments, creating numerous attack vectors for hackers.
Despite these blind spots, the survey showed that companies are taking security seriously. Over half of the companies surveyed reported double-digit security operations center (SOC) headcounts, showing a significant investment in keeping their organizations secure.
