As more businesses move to hybrid environments or adopt a cloud-first approach, the time has come to consider the latest cloud security best practices to safeguard their people, processes, and data.
According to research conducted by Sophos, 70% of companies that use the cloud faced a security threat in 2020. This proves that today, data cloud security is more important than ever. This term refers to a wide array of processes, controls, policies, and technologies that all security professionals, non-technical staff, and executive leadership need to know about so that they can protect their organization.
It is important to remember that unauthorized access to sensitive information, data loss, and theft of trade secrets are all possible on the cloud.
Phishing, brute-force attacks, ransomware transfers, malware injection, and hijacking of accounts are common ways of hacking. According to Embroker, third-party breaches have become even more common in 2022. Millions and millions of users are affected by these data breaches. Now, it’s time for cloud security solutions to build for the future with cyber resilience.
Here are some cloud security best practices to help you ensure that your organization does not succumb to threats:
Enhance Organization-Wide Understanding Of Data Security
Cloud computing has changed how businesses function as more organizations use managed and in-house solutions to store and secure data. This also makes data accessible to remote workers and off-site employees. While this is great for remote employees and employers, how can we ensure that data cloud security is airtight?
It’d be best to host team training sessions, publish informative newsletters, and arrange for practical workshops to show what a data hack would look like and what a response strategy should include.
Your data might be susceptible to the following:
- Malware
- Lack of visibility in network functions and operations
- Compliance failure
- Loss of sensitive data
It is vital that all employees understand data cloud security to ensure safety. After all, security affects all facets of the organization, including information technology systems and operational technology systems.
Define And Implement A Security Strategy
The ultimate goals of your IT security team won’t change with cloud adoption. Still, they may get more urgent and complicated to achieve. Goals must continue to focus on reducing the risk of attacks while ensuring that privacy, reliability, and accessibility assurances are built into all information systems.
It’s also essential for security teams to modernize their existing strategies, architectures, and technology to deal with the onslaught of cloud-based security issues discussed earlier. While the size and number of these threats may seem daunting initially, modernization allows security to shed light on how dangerous legacy systems can be.
Here are the practical steps needed to be taken to secure cloud-based data:
Create Cloud Security Policies
If your data is classified as regulated or sensitive, you can create policies to determine what kind of data is stored in the cloud. Moreover, you can remove or hide sensitive data in the cloud and coach employees if they accidentally break the policy you have set for data protection.
Use Encryption to Protect Sensitive Data
Creating an encryption model in the cloud service will secure your data from outside parties. However, remember that you will need to give your cloud service provider access to encryption keys. You can always encrypt the information and use your keys if you want full data access. This will not affect the work of your employees.
Limit Access to the Cloud
When information is saved in the cloud, your IT team should implement control policies across all devices in the organization. You can enforce this with minor actions like switching users to editor or viewer groups and controlling the data that can be sent through shared links.
Track Where Information Goes
Anyone using an internet connection can gain access to cloud services. However, if you allow random devices like personal employee phones to access the data, your security might be at risk in the future.
Your data cloud security should be tight enough to block downloads from unrecognized devices. If downloads are needed, create a setting that verifies information before giving access.
Update Malware and Encryption Services
For infrastructure as a service (IaaS) environments, you must boost data cloud security by strengthening network traffic, applications, and operating systems.
To make your infrastructure even more secure, apply anti-malware technology to all computers. You can even use application whitelisting for workloads. Moreover, machine-learning-based security can help with file stores.
Be Proactive
If a threat stays in your cloud environment for too long, the attacker can copy or delete all the data or infiltrate your system. This can cause a data breach that cannot be detected and contained in time.
However, the damage can be limited when businesses create a threat response plan that quickly reacts to data cloud security breaches.
Ensure that the threat response plan has strict procedures and roles are appropriately assigned so that each employee in your organization knows how to act and what to do in a security emergency. The key, however, is to manage risk proactively so that you never find yourself in a position to respond to it.
Proactive cyber risk management practices include:
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Early detection of control failure and suspicious activity.
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Regular updates on cyber practices and information to bolster risk awareness and data cloud security information throughout the enterprise.
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Limited access to the cloud platform, including removing old employees and proactive monitoring of unauthorized activity.
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Continuously monitoring and assessing the risk environment. This outlook on risk management enables organizations to function seamlessly with less downtime and interruptions.
Data Cloud Security for the Future
Monitoring your organization’s cloud closely is vital to identify potential security gaps that cybercriminals can use to exploit your business.
These best practices enhance the security measures to secure cloud-based data, infrastructure, and applications. Organizations use cloud data centers because it support scalability, cost efficiency, quick deployment, and ensure high flexibility.
Strengthen the risk management of your cloud applications with CyberStrong. Contact us to learn how CyberStrong can help your organization.
