Cloud computing is an essential element in modern businesses due to its scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. With the widespread adoption of digital transformation, security has become a severe concern for business leaders. At least 94% of companies globally are highly concerned about cloud security issues.
While most cloud providers implement robust security measures, the advent of security breaches justifies the rising concerns among businesses. It’s critical to take additional protective measures to safeguard your data. The following strategies can help you strengthen your cloud security to avoid downtimes.
1. Establish Security Baselines and Educate Your Staff
Establishing security baselines is vital before deploying effective cloud infrastructure security measures. In addition, you must understand your security requirements depending on your industry.
Businesses in different industries have specific regulations and security requirements. For instance, you may be required to adhere to HIPAA and PSIDSS on top of your internal security priorities. Once you know what to focus on, you can develop relevant policies and procedures in your organization.
Regardless, human error is the weakest link in most security systems. It’s essential to train your team on cloud best practices. These may include encryption, secure passwords, and phishing identification. The training should be ongoing to ensure your employees keep tabs on emerging threats that may compromise your organization’s data security.
Even with the modern advanced anti-phishing systems, it’s almost impossible to guarantee maximum security. While most phishing attempts get filtered by the security system, some attempts may bypass the anti-phishing system. If an employee opens the email, they might unknowingly launch the malware, and it takes only one incident to jeopardize the entire system.
2. Ensure Cyber Security Compliance
Cybersecurity compliance dictates the regulations, standards, and laws to protect private data and help businesses implement robust security measures. Unless you have the right tools and security controls to ensure compliance, your organization will likely face hefty fines if you experience a data breach. Most established cloud providers adhere to the various compliance requirements.
Nevertheless, any organization using a cloud service must ensure compliant data processes and security protocols. However, due to visibility issues in a quickly evolving cloud environment, the compliance audit process may be hectic.
Every organization must identify the relevant standards that pertain to your industry. For example, any financial organization using SWIFT services must adhere to the Swift Customer Security Program requirements. Businesses that store sensitive customer data should also ensure strict compliance with SOC 2 security compliance requirements. If you don’t know the specific compliance requirements relevant to your business, consulting a data protection expert for professional guidance on IT compliance is vital.
3. Establish a Solid Incident Response Strategy
The damage from a data breach incident may be too high unless you can detect, mitigate, and eliminate the underlying threats. When a threat remains active in your cloud infrastructure for too long, it gives the attacker enough time to steal or corrupt your data.
On the other hand, a quick response to security incidents can minimize the damage. As such, developing a robust response plan is vital for ensuring your organization can act immediately during emergencies.
The response plan should strictly define procedures and roles for possible threat scenarios. Most importantly, implementing a reliable threat detection and response system is essential for efficient response to security incidents in your cloud infrastructure. Most modern systems facilitate automatic detection of suspicious activity that often precedes a security breach. You can also get real-time notifications on potential incidents based on your cloud processes.
Depending on your system capabilities, you can block suspicious users or terminate affected processes. If you experience a cloud security incident, you can use the monitoring data to determine the extent of the breach and the best way to mitigate the damages.
4. Deploy Network Segmentation with Defined Access
Security is an important network component that ensures optimum cloud processes and operations. Most cloud security protocols include policy-based practices often deployed into the secure access edge in the cloud infrastructure.
The protection layer depends on various services that protect data across the loud environment. Services like browser isolation, web gateways, firewalls, and cloud access brokers are vital in any cloud ecosystem.
Systems with zero trust protocols offer better protection since all users are considered potentially malicious until authenticated. Most businesses leverage the zero trust network access due to its versatility. Zero trust network access can obscure IP addresses and isolate application access from main network access. This approach secures cloud resources against potential threats like active malware on vulnerable systems. Here, system access is only granted to verified devices and users.
ZTNA employs network segmentation to enhance cloud network security. Typically, network segmentation divides your network into small parts for better management. Most information technology systems leverage virtualization to segment the network and create secure network zones with enough capacity to support the intended workload.
The zones act as digital walls to prevent malicious entities from unrestricted navigation within the IT infrastructure. Most importantly, advanced solutions with automated capabilities help organizations create isolated zones that can adapt to changing threat conditions, workloads, and policies. This means you can establish new zones as your business expands or scale down your active zones when your usage declines.
5. Manage User Access
Most of your employees don’t need full access to all the data and applications on your cloud infrastructure. Implementing the correct authorization levels ensures each employee can only interact with data and applications essential for a specific task.
Assigning strict access controls helps prevent employees from editing sensitive data and locks out hackers who may use stolen credentials to manipulate your data. Most importantly, some regulatory bodies require access restrictions to protect important data.
If your organization doesn’t have an in-house team to manage cloud visibility and controls, you can partner with IT consultants to implement the security measures. Typically, identity and access management is essential to protect your business from evolving security threats.
6. Continuous Monitoring and Assessment
Continuous real-time analysis of user activities is vital to detect suspicious activities that may indicate a looming breach in your cloud infrastructure. For example, logins from unfamiliar devices and strange IP addresses can be a serious red flag. Identifying such activities early can help you fix the situation before hackers compromise your data.
There are numerous solutions that can help, including 24/7 network monitoring and assessment. Other advanced solutions like vulnerability scanning and endpoint detection can save your organization from expensive security incidents. However, every organization has different needs for cyber security services, so you should get the right Cloud Migration Assessment before you commit to a huge infrastructure investment.
However, some system irregularities may not always indicate malicious activities, especially when upgrading some cloud capabilities. However, this doesn’t mean you should ignore suspicious user activity. In fact, your team should analyze every activity and determine if you need to take preventive measures.
7. Implement Cloud-to-Cloud Backups
The chances of you losing vital data due to a cloud provider’s mistakes are relatively low. However, data loss due to human errors is quite prevalent. If your employee accidentally deletes data or a hacker obtains account credentials and corrupts your data, there’s little that a cloud provider can do to help beyond a certain time frame.
Most cloud providers may store deleted data for some time, but it’s important to consult your cloud provider and determine the timeframes. However, there may be costs involved when restoring lost or compromised data.
Cloud-to-cloud backup solutions are essential for organizations that must comply with strict data regulations to avoid penalties. While there are many cloud backup solutions on the market, you should choose a provider with a solution that meets your business needs.
8. Establish Off Boarding Protocols for Departing Staff
According to a recent study by Cyberark, at least 88% of workers in IT departments would leave with sensitive company data or run away with vital passwords if terminated. In addition, other studies show that about 50% of former employees can still access company networks and applications.
De-provisioning your former employees immediately after leaving the organization is essential. And since they no longer work in your company, they shouldn’t have access to the network system, data, intellectual assets, and sensitive consumer information. However, efficient and strict de-provisioning of employee access rights may be out of reach unless you have a systematic off-boarding protocol to manage access.
You must have a systematic off-boarding procedure and ensure all the departing employee’s permission rights are revoked immediately.
Depending on their role, employees are likely to have privileged access to various cloud resources and applications. As such, access rights for departing employees must be revoked at the onset of their exit process. This prevents malicious actions by disgruntled former employees that can lead to severe reputation and financial damages in case of a data breach.
Endnote
In the fast-paced cloud computing landscape, data security is a top priority for most organizations around the globe. However, cloud security is a serious issue that requires a continuous management strategy. Since modern security threats evolve quickly, remaining vigilant and using advanced security solutions is critical to safeguard your business from severe consequences.
