Securing Your Cloud – Best Practices and Solutions

As digital threat actors continue infiltrating and corrupting important customer or company data, companies must continually improve their cloud security practices. These practices include regulating access to data, monitoring for anomalies with user behavior analytics, and more.

Most people think outside hackers are the biggest threat to cloud security, but careless employees also jeopardize data through phishing and malware. This is why training employees on cloud security policies and settings is crucial.

Encryption

Encryption is one of the cornerstones of cloud security that organizations like Arctic IT provide, ensuring that your data is kept private and safe. It’s especially crucial for businesses operating in regulated industries, like healthcare, insurance, banking, and finance, where protection standards are more exacting and penalties for non-compliance can be steep.

Encryption also protects your data in transit. Encryption conventions such as TLS and SSL prevent unauthorized capture or eavesdropping during communication between your system and the cloud service provider’s servers.

Another important best practice involves training your staff and stakeholders on secure cloud practices. Thorough knowledge and application of these practices could be the difference between a secure system and one that opens up doors for cyberattacks. In addition to implementing security awareness, consider solutions that perform vulnerability and penetration testing to identify threats.

Physical Security

Security threats often target cloud systems by leveraging endpoints. These include users’ computers, mobile phones, and other devices that access your cloud. It would help if you protected these endpoints with advanced cybersecurity tools.

Ensure your cloud is located in Tier IV data centers with high accreditations and physical security measures, such as round-the-clock surveillance and armed security patrols. Check that your service providers have these capabilities before signing contracts.

Use a CASB solution to detect and respond to malicious insider threats and privileged account abuse in your cloud environment. This will help you maintain compliance with industry and governmental standards. Consider also calculating through-life costs to compare upfront and recurring costs of a cloud-based security infrastructure with on-prem alternatives. The most cost-effective system will balance operational and risk considerations.

Network Security

Effective network security is one of the most important aspects of securing your cloud. It includes a variety of best practices and solutions, such as a Zero Trust approach, a firewall, anti-malware technology, and more. In addition, organizations should deploy a vulnerability scanning solution and conduct penetration testing regularly.

Insufficient network security can lead to unauthorized access to data in the cloud, which could lead to data breaches and other security events. To limit this risk, deploy a strong Identity and Access Management (IAM) system with multi-factor authentication and access recertification procedures.

In addition, implement data protection policies that include encryption for data in motion and at rest and advanced malware protection for infrastructure-as-a-service environments. Consider a cloud SIEM solution that can help you detect configuration changes and other vulnerabilities across your ecosystem.

Backups

Backups are one of the most important components of your cloud security strategy. They are necessary to ensure your organization can recover data during a disaster.

Server backup solutions are software programs that help you back up data from your servers to another local server or a cloud solution. They typically support many file types and can duplicate backups across multiple locations and media for improved recovery speed and failover capability.

Backup solutions that utilize the cloud can also be called backup-as-a-service (BaaS). Ensure that your service provider clearly outlines who owns your uploaded data and has a clear incident response plan. You should also find out whether they have a transparent security screening process that aligns with your country’s locally established standards.

Access Control

The first step to securing your cloud is establishing an access control baseline. This should include a zero-trust approach with segmentation of different services and ensuring that communication between the various parts of your cloud environment is tightly controlled. This should also include restrictions on who can download, modify, or share data from your cloud services to prevent the movement of sensitive information from your environment to unmanaged devices.

You should regularly monitor and review your security baseline and look for an option that offers visibility of your disparate cloud resources across multiple providers, projects, and geographies. A solution that automates activity monitoring can help detect and respond to changes in your cloud environment quickly. This includes identifying and responding to unauthorized data movements, insider threats, privileged accounts and denial of service attacks.