Page 98 - Cyber Defense eMagazine April 2021 Edition

Your Cloud is Having an Identity Crisis: Why

it’s happening — and how to deal with it

By Eric Kedrosky, CISO and Director of Cloud Research of Sonrai Security

If you’re like most organizations, you haven’t dug deep enough to understand the complexities of all the
Identities and their interconnected relationships and intricacies in your multi-cloud environment. Even after all
the headlines of the past few years where organizations have suffered massive data breaches in their public
cloud, there are still some who think that this won’t happen to them. They are wrong.

Identity and data access complexity is a ticking time bomb in your cloud. The average organization has more
than tens of thousands of pieces of compute, thousands of roles, and a dizzying array of interdependencies
and permissions to their data, and it is mostly hidden from view. Your environment is having an identity crisis
and you have no visibility into the risks that exist.

The security paradigm changed as soon as you moved to the public cloud. Did you notice? More importantly,
have you changed your security strategy to adapt and keep your data safe? In the old days of data centers,
the security boundaries were formed by networks and the security stack placed at the borders. In the cloud,
this is no longer feasible, manageable, and in a lot of cases, even possible.

98 Cyber Defense eMagazine – April 2021 Edition
Copyright © 2021, Cyber Defense Magazine. All rights reserved worldwide.