Cloud Cyber Security.
Learn ways to ensure the cloud doesn’t cast a shadow over your cybersecurity
The digital transformation accelerated by the pandemic means more demand for cloud services.
The increasing complexity of cloud computing has opened up more security holes. So traditional cybersecurity must be complemented by cloud-native solutions.
We are now more than a year into the coronavirus pandemic, which has transformed the way we do business. For many, it’s been a year since they walked into the office or on a plane, and yet business continued and digital transformation accelerated.
Digital transformation has been going on for years, but the pandemic has forced the hand of many organizations as they have changed the way they operate and provide value to customers. In turn, this shift has meant an increased demand for cloud computing, which provides most of the foundations, tools, and infrastructure.
This model allows companies to focus on excellence in their own business. While leaving the burden of their non-core business elements like infrastructure, platforms and software to cloud providers.
This change has provided organizations with the following benefits.
- The nature of cloud services allows companies to pay only for the resources they use, whether IaaS, PaaS or SaaS. Therefore, this service-based payment provides organizations with the ability to shift from capital expenditures to operating expenses business model. This often results in significant cost savings for cloud cybersecurity.
- Scalability, where compute, network and storage capacities can be scaled up and down almost infinitely and almost immediately in response to fluctuations in demand.
- Agility, where developers can make continuous improvements to applications and these improved applications can be deployed to client’s multiple times a day.
- Availability, disaster recovery and redundancy are enhanced by cloud vendors offering service guarantee for availability of computing resources.
However, even with all these benefits, the rapid transformation has opened many security holes for organizations. In fact, some world leaders in the cybersecurity space, including the World Economic Forum . Who predict that this rapid and unplanned move will result in a cyber pandemic in the future.
A recent cloud security report showed that 66% of respondents believe traditional security solutions don’t work or have limited functionality.
To be prepared for tomorrow’s attack vectors, you need to use cloud-native solutions to secure your cloud deployments. Certainly so they can meet dynamic and scalable cloud computing requirements.
Given how the growing threat landscape undermines the benefits of greater cloud adoption for cloud cybersecurity.
Here are five strategies you can implement in your organization to protect yourself now and in the future.
1. Consult
A trusted cloud security advisor to benefit from industry best practices and incorporate cloud security into design.
Cloud security misconfigurations expose organizations to risky and costly cloud security threats. Unless they cause real danger long before the threat can be managed.
Be sure to work with a professional who is fully trained in these threats and can help you implement the best possible solution to protect your environment.
2. Tools
Consolidated threat prevention cloud tools. Cloud security is much more complex than traditional on-premises security. Because instead of one perimeter, the network link that connects your business to the Internet, you now have multiple perimeters.
Including each cloud computing service, each employee and access role accessing those services. So with every new data store and every different workload or application operating in the cloud.
While each cloud provider has its own security services, there are thousands of third-party providers that offer cloud security solutions. Each of these additional “point solutions” in your organization has requirements for staffing, training, deploying, integrating, and maintaining cybersecurity.
More point solutions cause an exponential increase in complexity. In fact, evaluate cloud security solutions that cover the widest range of features, rather than multiple solutions with more restricted functionality.
Ultimately, this will give you a wider range of security with less to manage.
3. Center visibility.
Visibility is particularly important in cloud security, because you can’t protect what you can’t see. However, with so many different resources running across multiple public and private clouds, visibility becomes an even bigger issue.
Implement a cloud security solution that also provides broad visibility across all your environments and leverages AI and machine learning. Especially to allow you to take action on important alerts. So this integration will also help to identify blind spots where hackers tend to hide.
4. Exercise
Conduct regular risk management exercises for all possible and impossible cloud security solutions. In other words, disaster recovery is the new normal.
Take the example of Gas South, which suffered from power outages and needed to ensure scalable and secure remote access for its call center workers to its cloud provider.
They were delighted to be able to offer their employees the benefit of working one day a week from home. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit and sent all the employees home anyway. Conduct stress tests to ensure that the deployment actually scales safely without impeding performance.
5. Trust no one.
Embrace zero-trust security in everything you do, for networks, people, devices, data and workloads. Either way, make sure there are security perimeters around each of these areas. In that sense, your organization is only granting access based on minimum permissions and privilege levels to your employees and apps.
Now tell me if this isn’t a very intriguing subject that looks like something from HACKERS MOVIES.
Cloud computing has to re-evaluate cybersecurity practices.
Find out why cloud computing is driving IT security professionals to re-evaluate their internal cybersecurity practices. As well as features provided by managed service providers.
Looking back, we might wonder how we ever managed to live without cloud computing. So cloud computing has, and will continue to be, an innovative technology in the way it transforms the way we use the Internet.
Along with cloud computing, advances in microprocessor technology are changing our concept of computing. As microprocessor speeds increased, so did memory density and speed.
As for how the cloud is being leveraged, malware that was once the purveyor of Darkside’s elite programmers. However, it is now available to anyone willing to pay for it and a delivery platform.
This is giving cybersecurity professionals pause. So much so that they are revisiting their internal cybersecurity practices, as well as the capabilities provided by managed service providers.
“Rethinking” by those responsible for a company’s cybersecurity is important now more than ever. Because the numbers make sense for companies to migrate their business platforms to the cloud.
More importantly, your business or customers need not only be aware of this attack vector. But also be prepared to adapt to this ever-evolving threat landscape in cloud cybersecurity.
It’s more than just good technology practice it’s becoming essential to limit legal liability.
How to mitigate cloud-related security risks?
Balance efficient operation with security optimization, third-party infrastructure integration can be good from a performance point of view. But terrible from a security point of view.
This is even more important when third-party infrastructure is integrated into the platform.
However, unfortunately, there can be tension between IT, corporate and legal when it comes to implementation.
Network segmentation is a good thing; network segmentation is vital. Proper segmentation of networks would have helped to limit privileges and stop the hop along this attack vector in its path.
Cloud cybersecurity is the vital way to go online around the world.
Segmenting sensitive information on other virtual servers will make it much more difficult for hackers to get that information in the first place. Therefore, another important consideration is limiting lateral access to platform services, which should reduce the responsibility for data security.
Data encryption is your friend, for now encrypting data is a no-brainer and embedding should be especially considered when using cloud services. It limits the exposure and liability of the data. That said, there are factors that make it difficult to use data encryption.
Encryption may not always be available to the application or be feasible from a user performance point of view and access times are adversely affected.
Conclusion
To learn more about certifications and this exciting world of cybersecurity.
Cybersecurity experts warn that cloud computing poses even more risks, it may be time to pay attention.
So be aware of everything that has been exposed in this article, because the best way to prevent yourself is to have knowledge about what is happening.
And if you want to be part of the elite of the cybersecurity market, join us.
