The recent SolarWinds breach is an excellent example of the concept, once eloquently stated by the Provisional Irish Republican Army “[Attackers] only have to be lucky once. [Defenders] will have to be lucky always.” With an increasing number of companies experiencing business-halting security breaches and an ever-growing quantity of personal and private information being stolen and put up for sale on the black market, the stakes have never been higher.

One of the more important takeaways from the Congressional testimony surrounding the incident was that the use of a mixed system of sufficient size and complexity, utilizing components from hundreds or potentially thousands of vendors, inherently has significant security blind spots. The combination of complexity and potential security gaps does not always provide an exploitable pathway for malicious attackers, but when it does, the consequences can be disastrous.

As enterprises continue to pursue the benefits of moving to the cloud, IT professionals find themselves increasingly faced with the need to integrate existing tools and systems into a new cloud-based platform. With a majority of businesses utilizing a hybrid cloud model that includes a mix of on-premises infrastructure and public cloud systems, the seemingly inevitable result is a cobbled-together IT system: the new being forced to adapt to the old, controlled by multiple disconnected management tools, with the resulting gaps providing vulnerabilities ripe for future exploitation by hackers.

With managed security service providers (MSSPs) taking on a rapidly expanding customer base utilizing thousands of disparate systems, the need for an integrated, highly effective approach becomes all the more imperative. MSSPs can assist enterprises in addressing potential security risks by moving security to the top of the list of priorities in a company’s cloud strategy.

With security being built in from the beginning, the ability to ‘connect the dots’ of a potential or ongoing attack is greatly enhanced, and the number of disparate systems creating potential vulnerabilities is reduced. Companies would do well to take an integrated approach to security by partnering with a trusted security provider that can assist in guiding their cloud strategy toward greater unification.