The first hour after a heart attack is known as “the golden hour.” Taking appropriate action within this first hour can save a patient’s life. Unfortunately, a high amount of fatalities occur before such patients reach the hospital. Replicate the scene in tech circles and you will notice that most organisations are slow to detect and respond to threats within an hour. Recent research undertaken by US-based cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks reveals that an overwhelming lot (90% of organisations) cannot detect, contain and resolve cyber threats within the golden hour.
Palo Alto’s 2023 State of Cloud-Native Security Report surveyed more than 2,500 C-level executives around the world to better understand their cloud adoption strategies, and how those strategies are working. With organisations of all sizes moving more of their operations to the cloud, a majority are struggling to automate cloud security and mitigate risks. In fact, the expansion of hybrid work during the pandemic drove organisations to expand their use of clouds by more than 25%. As a result, DevOps teams are being pressed to deliver production code at warp speed — making application security more complex, and putting pressure on security organisations to keep pace.
As per the report, 90% of organisations said they cannot detect, contain and resolve cyber threats within an hour. A majority reported a weak security posture, and believe they need to improve their underlying activities — from gaining visibility into multiple clouds, to applying more consistent governance across accounts, to streamlining incident response and investigation.
The report also focused on a greater need for code-to-cloud security. As more applications are built in the cloud using off-the-shelf software, there’s a risk that any vulnerability in the development process could compromise an entire application later. That’s why firms are encouraging a deeper level of engagement between application developers and security tools and teams — with 81% of respondents saying they have embedded security professionals inside their DevOps teams.
“With three out of four organisations deploying new or updated code to production weekly, and almost 40% committing new code daily, no one can afford to overlook the security of cloud workloads,” said Ankur Shah, senior vice president, Prisma Cloud, Palo Alto Networks.