Businesses across multiple industries are now using cloud computing, and experts predict the cloud market to be worth over $800 Billion by 2025. While this technology is revolutionizing how businesses operate, security is becoming a big concern among users.
Maintaining a secure cloud environment is vital due to the growing number of threats, including DDoS attacks, phishing, and malware attacks. If the cloud security is insufficient, your company data can be accessible to cybercriminals. Therefore, it’s essential to understand how to improve cloud security and minimize risks. In this article, you’ll learn more about cloud security best practices and how to improve your security posture.
1. Understand Your Responsibilities and Risks
When implementing cloud security best practices, it’s essential to evaluate risks and responsibilities to minimize the occurrence of security incidents. Typically, your cloud services provider plays a vital role in ensuring cloud environment security. Therefore, make sure you understand what tasks you are responsible for and what your provider is supposed to handle.
The shared responsibility model is common in most cloud services like PaaS, SaaS, and, IaaS. You should confirm the distribution of responsibilities between the service provider and your business. Most importantly, you should inquire about your provider’s cloud security measures, including incident prevention, encryption, access levels, and backup protocols. In the end, a reliable service provider makes compliance easy while enhancing your cloud security. Regardless of the cloud service model you are using, you are responsible for all your data.
2. Cloud Security Training
Users have a vital role in maintaining cloud security since they have access to sensitive data. Your team’s ability to identify potential threats can impact your overall cloud security. Unless your team is knowledgeable about cyber threats like malware and phishing attempts, intruders will have an easy time infiltrating your cloud environment. Ideally, providing sufficient cloud security training to your employees can reduce security incidents.
Most people access cloud services through a web browser; hence it’s vital to enhance your endpoint security. This involves ensuring all end-user devices are secured to boost protection against hackers. You can do so by establishing password security policies that require employees to set up strong passwords and change them every three months.
At the same time, access control policies can help you manage access levels for various users. On the other hand, establishing operational cybersecurity rules can ensure all users are abiding by security protocols to boost cloud safety.
3. Data Encryption and Multifactor Authentication
Sending and receiving data in the cloud environment comes with security risks. You can protect the data by implementing encryption solutions to ensure unauthorized users can’t access your data. Encryption transforms data into unreadable data, and only users with decryption keys can decode and access the data.
You can either use symmetric or asymmetric encryption to protect your data. The former is easier to use since it uses the same key for encryption and decryption. On the other hand, asymmetric encryption uses a public key for encryption and a private key for decryption.
Some cloud providers have encryption protocols with end-to-end protection to breach protection and malicious access. However, if you need more control over the cloud service, it’s important to encrypt the data before sharing.
4. Monitoring Systems
Businesses should always monitor cloud infrastructure to uncover potential security threats. Typically, monitoring the cloud environment and networks for suspicious activity like remote connections can help you evaluate the security status.
You can simplify the monitoring process by using monitoring tools to analyze the servers. The tools have numerous advantages, including simple setup and configuration, seamless monitoring of data from multiple locations, and reporting capabilities to enhance compliance.
It’s prudent to select metrics that have an impact on your business cash flow before choosing activities to track. Also, make sure you are using one platform for data reporting to eliminate confusion. The visibility of your cloud services is essential since users access the services from multiple locations. This mode of usage often creates blind spots in the cloud environment, thus compromising visibility. Therefore, it’s vital to make sure you have a security solution that maintains continuous visibility of the cloud infrastructure to help you implement access controls.
You can also use a cloud access security broker to implement superior cloud security practices. Such tools often help businesses enhance cloud security controls. And that’s because it increases visibility, manages compliance, enforces data security policies, and enhances threat protection and detection. Overall, cloud access security broker tools are essential for your cloud security and isolation strategy.
5. Establish an Off Boarding Process
Whenever an employee leaves your organization, it’s important to ensure they no longer have access to cloud systems, data, and digital assets. While this process is critical, most businesses tend to delay implementation, which in turn risks cloud security.
Since employees have access to different cloud services, it’s important to implement a systemic de-provisioning protocol to ensure all access rights are canceled once a worker resigns from your company. But if you can’t manage the process internally, you can outsource the processes to an external partner.
6. Cloud-to-Cloud Backups
While the chances of losing data due to service provider mishaps are low, at least 90% of data losses often occur due to human errors. For instance, if your employees delete data by accident or leak passwords to hackers, there’s little that your service provider can do to reverse the incidents. However, most cloud providers store deleted files briefly before trashing them.
It’s crucial to check with your service provider to find out the timeframes for holding deleted data and whether there are any charges for data restoration. If your business is subject to strict compliance regulations, you might want to invest in cloud-to-cloud backup solutions. Since there are numerous backup solutions, it’s prudent to speak with IT consultants to determine the most appropriate solution for your business.
7. Pentesting Your Cloud Infrastructure
To verify the security and integrity of your cloud infrastructure, it’s important to schedule and implement regular testing. Your business can partner with third-party firms that perform penetration testing that simulate various types of attacks to help you determine system vulnerabilities.
The rising popularity of cloud technology has prompted security leaders to become more creative. While cloud infrastructure requires regular testing, the design introduces legal and technical complexities. Cloud governance becomes more complex as the resources and services deployed increase.
If you anticipate growth in your cloud operations, it’s important to implement a governance scheme to apply principles and policies. Besides implementing VPN protocols for secure access and use of cloud services, your security team should regularly test the cloud assets to eliminate weaknesses.
Conclusion
Cloud computing is a cost-effective business solution, and you can take specific actions to enhance its security. Typically, maintaining cloud security requires the appropriate security hygiene and practices throughout the company. Besides ensuring constant visibility of your cloud infrastructure, you need to train your employees and encourage security best practices.
