With the popularity of cloud computing, cloud-based and cloud-specific security threats have become new challenges that IT decision-makers have to face.
It is difficult for many companies to keep up with the development of emerging technologies in the protection of data security and privacy. In this case, companies will choose to go to the cloud and other ways to achieve data security. However, moving to the cloud still cannot solve this problem. Without proper security measures and risk assessment, cyber threats will still pose risks.
As customers using the cloud, enterprises have the responsibility to protect the security of their own and users’ data and applications. The following measures to protect cloud security are worth considering:
Choose a roadmap that fits your cloud security strategy
Consider choosing an approach better suited to address cloud security challenges that emphasize frameworks and standards. Services are then selected based on their suitability for this ecosystem. This may increase the upfront cost of the service but may reduce administrative costs later on.
With a cloud security strategy that is both broad and unified across hybrid and multi-cloud providers, organizations can build a secure cloud computing environment that is easy to build, manage, and maintain.
Pay attention to configuration errors
Prevent misconfigurations, a problem that persists in most cloud computing data breaches.
More than one in five reported data breaches in 2019 were due to misconfiguration and, in all cases, human error.
But “don’t make mistakes” is easier said than done. Most of the teams involved didn’t realize they had a responsibility to fix the specific problems that were to blame. In other cases, they lack the tools to audit configurations.
Organizations must provide support and training for IT operations staff and ensure that security teams have adequate knowledge of cloud computing platforms. It may also be helpful to use cloud-native tools to monitor common misconfigurations, including bucket risks.
Use identity and access management tools
Organizations carefully maintain identity and access management (IAM) solutions to address some of the most common cloud security concerns.
In hybrid cloud-based environments, credential compromise is a significant threat. Such attacks are notoriously difficult to detect quickly. Organizations can use identity and access management tools to limit employee and user access to data. In this way, malicious people can be prevented from entering and destroying data, and the threat can be controlled within a limited range.
Encryption and Firewall
Enterprises can also use encryption and firewalls to provide security protection for data in transit and at rest, and implement end-to-end encryption to protect data.
Data at rest is encrypted by default.
While encryption by itself does not prevent data breaches, it does provide another layer of assurance that in the event of a breach, data will not be compromised. It’s just an extra safeguard, but it plays a key role in multi-cloud vendor security. Automated tools provide insight into whether encryption is enabled for each cloud storage bucket.
Password policy
Establishing a robust, secure password policy, already using multi-factor authentication, can ensure that employee or device passwords cannot be compromised.
Private and Hybrid Cloud
Using private and hybrid clouds to classify and store data enables companies to store sensitive data while storing public data.
Regular patching and maintenance
Keeping patches up to date to minimize the exposure of server software to new threats is an essential cloud security measure. The same goes for configuring automatic vulnerability scans. It is important to regularly perform comprehensive security and system-wide audits to identify any outdated processes, compromised passwords, and other security risks.
