Transitioning to cloud is a rite of initiation into the digital era. Over the past decade companies large and small have taken the journey and moved their data from on-premises data centers to storage in the cloud.

While confidence in cloud security is high, all that free-flowing data is a siren’s call for criminals. The old security measures of “castle and moat” don’t work once the data is freed from on-prem, opening a market for innovations in cloud security.

“We’ve been looking at cloud-native threats and what it means to even secure data in the cloud, which is very different from securing data in your enterprise,” said Sekhar Sarukkai (pictured), vice president and technical fellow at McAfee LLC. “In our analysis, we’ve seen that 50% of traffic is cloud to cloud, so it bypasses your traditional enterprise network. It bypasses the devices.”

Surukkai spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the RSA Conference in San Francisco. They discussed cloud security challenges and new features on McAfee’s MVISION cloud-native security platform.

Don’t leave the keys in the car and complain when it’s stolen

The number one security threat doesn’t come from bad actors, but from lax security practices within the company. “While cloud is easy and quick to adopt, it’s very easy to misconfigure stuff,” Surukkai said, quoting a Gartner report that predicted “through 2025, 99% of cloud security failures will be the customer fault.”

This wouldn’t be a problem of every company properly understood their role in the shared responsibility model, according to Sarukkai. But, eliminating human error is a tough call. It doesn’t help that the surfeit of security vendors and products is creating a complex and splintered marketplace, adding to the confusion.

“At the end of the day, the customer is moving the workload, an application into cloud,” Surukkai said.

From endpoint to cloud and beyond

McAfee is the granddaddy of endpoint security, but success in on-premises security doesn’t guarantee entry into the cloud-security market. To bolster its cloud presence, the company acquired cloud access security broker provider Skyhigh Networks in 2018, forming the basis of its MVISION cloud-native security platform.

Customers need a consistent way to ensure the configurations are right, the data is secure, and there are no threats to it, according to Sarukkai. “We need to make that model of simplicity, of consistency across all of these kind of products,” he said.

By adding unified cloud edge capabilities — as announced during RSA  — MVISION has become “the first product to integrate the policies and visibility into data flow between the clouds, to and from the cloud, and in the device,” Surukkai concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the RSA Conference.

Photo: SiliconANGLE