Editorial

COVID-19 causes cloud adoption to soar within UK firms

New survey from Centrify also shows almost forty percent of business leaders say that the pandemic has exposed huge gaps in their cybersecurity armour

Posted 25 September 2020 by Christine Horton


Cloud adoption has so far saved more than half of UK businesses from collapse during the Covid-19 pandemic.

That’s according to a poll commissioned by security firm Centrify, which also reveals that 60 percent are planning to substantially increase their use of cloud-based IT, especially following the government’s recent U-turn on the work-from-home policy in the UK.

However, the research, which surveyed 200 senior business decision makers in large- and medium-sized companies in the UK in September, also found that COVID-19 has exposed serious weaknesses in businesses’ IT security. Thirty-nine percent of decision-makers say that the pandemic has exposed huge gaps in their cybersecurity armour

Sixty percent of business leaders agreed that they are more aware of the risks facing their organisation after the recent surge in phishing attacks aimed at quarantined remote workers.

Worryingly, 56 percent of those surveyed said that remote working has made it harder to identify potential hackers impersonating staff, and, as a result, more than half (51 percent) say remote working has led to an increase in insider threats.

This, says Centrify, highlights a need for modern cybersecurity solutions that can limit access and privilege by segregating duties, implementing access request and approval workflows, and leveraging behaviour analytics based on machine learning technology.

“Facing the security threats posed by Covid-19 continues to be no easy task, but fortunately business leaders have been rewarded for their trust in public cloud adoption,” said Andy Heather, VP, Centrify.

“Addressing this concern starts with adopting a cloud-ready privileged access management security solution to enforce least privilege, only granting administrative users just enough access to resources, just in time to do the job required. A modern approach to privileged access control enables businesses to continue remote operations across scalable multi-cloud environments whilst remaining confident that internal threats are flagged, blocked and neutralised.”