Centrify, the leading provider of Cloud-Ready Zero Trust Privilege to Protect Modern Companies, today announced the results of an onsite referendum held during GITEX 2019.

Overall, the majority of respondents indicated that Privileged Access Management (PAM) is important to their organization, with more than 90% of respondents indicating that BAM is important in their overall cyber security strategy. However, although the importance of PAM was pointed out by the respondents, their real-life adoption and use of PAM was very limited. Only 35% of respondents confirmed that privilege access management is used by their organization. The remaining 65% of respondents did not consider testing, research or Privileged Access Management at this time.

This onsite poll indicates that companies in the Middle East are ignoring the risk of allowing privileged access to administrative users without any restrictions. Globally, Centrify and others have found that 74% of data breaches have privileged access to abuse. What is more, we are constantly discovering that this is not a lack of awareness, but a lack of action. Companies now need to prioritize privileged access management as an effective security plan, and do so with the modern approach and minimal concessions established in Zero Trust, explains Kamal Heus, Regional Director for Northern, Southern Europe, Middle East and Africa at Centrify.

The Centrify poll found that while 42% of respondents move their workload to the cloud, only 8% understand their responsibility to gain privileged access to cloud environments. The remaining respondents felt that this was the responsibility or shared responsibility of the cloud service provider.

These onsite findings demonstrate a lack of understanding of the shared responsibility model when it comes to protecting cloud environments. Without a proper understanding that this is their responsibility, it is not surprising that the vast majority of people do not use PAM solutions to protect cloud management accounts and access cloud workloads. The cloud is a new attack surface that must be protected. With the enhanced role of threat actors and the involvement of government actors in the region, no company can withstand the costly impact of data breach and the associated downtime of the business, said Heus.

In the cloud-ready environment, focused and limited number of questions were asked by onsite respondents to find their acceptance of privileged access management solutions and best practices. In GITEX 2019 80 respondents participated in this onsite survey conducted by Centrify.