IT budgets will undoubtedly be impacted by the potential economic recession on the horizon, and enterprises will need to prioritize security during recessionary cloud migrations, according to Arctic Wolf CPO Dan Schiappa.

The hardest part of moving to the cloud with the goal of saving money is “actually finding the money to fund the projects for migrations,” he wrote in an email to SDxCentral. In efforts to cut IT costs, Schiappa expects companies will try to negotiate contract prices and weigh their cloud provider options based on cost-effectiveness.

Once that hurdle is cleared, keeping this new cloud infrastructure secure is the next thing that will keep companies up at night. “Having a security model that expands beyond traditional to cloud in one effort is daunting,” he explained.

Business leaders need to understand what it really means to change security models from on premises to cloud. This includes an awareness of the type of access granted to different users.

In onboarding, all admins are usually given access to the cloud — even if they really just need access to a few parts of it. “By granting full access to all admins, it widens the future pool of accounts that could be compromised and that cybercriminals could use to access the cloud,” Schiappa explained.

“One of the biggest cloud attack vectors that we’ve seen is deployed through 'unprivileged accounts,'” he added.

Efficient tech spending is key in the face of an upcoming recession. Schiappa recommends enterprises that have already migrated to the cloud lean on FinOps teams to monitor cloud usage and spending.

He also pointed to vendors that “help negotiate better rates or analyze how efficient cloud usage is” as an avenue of exploration.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure have long been the dominant providers in the industry, which has granted them flexibility to alter their prices on a case-by-case basis, Schiappa explained.

“In turn, we could see the cost of cloud services change so the Big 3 are able to gain more customers and sign them up for more services,” he said.

However, just like with any tech product, the cloud giants' services alone don't quite “suffice the needs to customers, particularly around security,” he said. “This is where the vendor marketplace can fill those gaps.”