News

At RSA Conference, Cloud Security Tops Ransomware as Chief Concern

• By David Ramel
• 06/09/2022

For all the buzz about ransomware lately, it wasn't the chief concern among attendees at this week's big security-focused RSA Conference in San Francisco.

Instead, according to an onsite survey conducted by Delinea, that dubious honor went to cloud security.

"The survey of over 100 cybersecurity professionals asked attendees about their top concerns for cybersecurity in 2022, where they stand when it comes to cyber insurance and cyber hygiene practices," said Delinea, a specialist in privileged access management (PAM).

"Notably, the survey found that cloud security (37 percent) is the main cybersecurity concern in 2022, more than ransomware (19 percent) and remote workers (17 percent)."

In other findings, the survey also revealed that 80 percent of respondents said their organization had not been breached in the past year, which Delinea speculated may be related to increased "cyber hygiene" employee practices. RSA Conference attendees are obviously more security conscious than your average IT pro, and Delinea found that 59 percent of respondents said they don't use the same password on multiple accounts, while two thirds said they use multi-factor authentication (MFA) whenever available.

Attendees were also asked about their organizations' incident response readiness, where 41 percent of respondents said their organization has or is strongly considering using cyber insurance.

"Protecting digital assets in the cloud is becoming priority number one, reflecting a more proactive approach to cybersecurity," said Joseph Carson, chief security scientist and advisory CISO at Delinea. "As businesses become more reliant on the cloud for infrastructure, application development, and business process automation, security skills and solutions need to keep up. Securing privileged access to cloud infrastructure and workloads before attackers take advantage is imperative."