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Recent years have witnessed a rapid proliferation of discussions regarding cloud migration and digital transformation within business settings. Each term's significance depends on your company, yet both desire change.
Enterprises seeking a balance of productivity and security must embrace new concepts. Modern technologies can enable companies to expand their capabilities beyond what their current on-premise infrastructure allows. Still, failure to properly secure cloud environments will negatively impact productivity and security. To strike the ideal balance, enterprises must understand how the latest cloud-related technologies can be leveraged while adhering to sound security practices.
Cloud Computing is a New Concept
Cloud computing (the "cloud") refers to using the Internet to access resources like databases, software applications and data without local hardware limitations. This technology enables organizations to expand operations by offloading infrastructure management as an overall scaling plan.
Cloud computing is a popular and widespread service.
- IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service): A hybrid approach where organizations can manage some of their data and applications on-premise while relying on cloud providers to manage servers, hardware, networking, virtualization, and storage needs.
- PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service): Gives organizations the ability to streamline their application development and delivery by providing a custom application framework that automatically manages operating systems, software updates, storage, and supporting infrastructure in the cloud.
- SaaS (Software-as-a-Service): Cloud-based software hosted online and typically available on a subscription basis. Third-party service providers handle all technical problems, including data, middleware and servers. They also streamline maintenance and support.
Cloud Security: Why is it Important?
Modern enterprises are turning increasingly to cloud computing environments such as IaaS or PaaS for business computing needs, where resources such as resourcing departments can become difficult due to the infrastructure's dynamic nature, including scaling services and applications up/down as necessary. Outsourcing such tasks under as-a-service arrangements saves organizations time and effort when managing IT tasks.
Data security requirements have become increasingly crucial as companies move their infrastructures into the cloud. Although third-party cloud providers manage this infrastructure, responsibility and accountability, remain with each organization transferring their infrastructures over to them.
Cloud providers typically adhere to best security practices, actively protecting their servers. Organizations must still make their own decisions on protecting data, apps and workloads that run on the cloud.
As our digital world rapidly develops, security threats become ever more sophisticated. Cloud computing provides the ideal arena for these sophisticated attacks due to a lack of visibility into data movement and access. Organizations could face serious governance and compliance risks when managing customer information.
No matter the size or industry of your business, cloud security must not be ignored. Cloud infrastructure now supports nearly every aspect of computing in multiple sectors and should not be taken lightly.
Reducing cyber threats to ensure successful cloud adoption requires taking adequate preventive measures against cloud server attacks. Implementing security best practices that ensure business continuity is essential, whether using public, hybrid, or private clouds.
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Cloud Security: What are the Different Types?
IAM (Identity and Access Management)
IAM tools and services enable enterprises to enforce policies for users who access cloud and on-premises services. IAMs core function is to provide digital identities to all users so that they can be monitored and restricted as necessary when interacting with data.
Data Loss prevention (DLP)
Services for data loss prevention (DLP), which are designed to protect cloud-based data, offer tools and services that ensure security. DLP solutions combine remediation alerts with data encryption and other preventative methods to safeguard all data stored at rest or on the move.
SIEM (Security Information and Event Management)
SIEM is a security orchestration tool that provides an automated threat detection and monitoring solution for cloud environments. SIEM uses artificial intelligence-driven technology to correlate log data from multiple digital platforms. This allows IT teams to implement their network security protocol while quickly responding to potential threats.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Data breaches and outages are still possible, regardless of an organization's preventative measures. Businesses must be able to react quickly to new vulnerabilities and system failures. Cloud security is not complete without disaster recovery solutions. These provide the organizations with tools, services and protocols to help them recover lost data quickly and return to normal operations.
What Should Cloud Security Look like?
Cloud security varies between organizations and depends upon multiple factors; to help secure and sustainably implement cloud computing environments, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has issued recommended practices.
NIST developed measures for organizations of any size or industry to use when assessing their security readiness and taking preventive and remedial actions. Their cybersecurity framework encompasses five principles: Identification, Protection, Detection, Response and Recovery.
Cloud security posture management (CSPM) is another emerging technology designed to implement NIST's cybersecurity framework. CSPM works to address misconfiguration issues commonly found within cloud environments.
Whether by businesses or cloud providers, misconfigurations in cloud infrastructures can increase an organization's attack surface. CSPM helps address these problems by organizing and deploying key components of cloud security: Identity and Access Management (IAM), Regulatory Compliance Management, Traffic Monitoring, Threat Response Response Mitigation, Risk Mitigation, and Digital Asset Management.
Cloud Security: The Most Advanced Challenges
Public clouds differ significantly from their private counterparts due to their non-delineated boundaries and complex nature, becoming particularly so when modern methods like automating Continuous Integration and Deployment, Distributed Serverless Architectures or Ephemeral Assets such as Functions As A Service and Containers are utilized.
Cloud-native organizations face numerous advanced security threats, such as:
1. Increased Attack Surface
Hackers have increasingly relied upon poorly protected cloud entry ports to gain entry to cloud workloads and data, thus opening themselves up to malicious threats such as Zero-Day exploits, Account Takeover attacks and Malware infections that pose daily dangers.
2. Tracking and Visibility
IaaS cloud models give providers complete control and visibility over infrastructure without permitting clients to see it directly. PaaS or SaaS models create even less control and visibility; customers of cloud services often struggle with identifying assets within their cloud environments or visualizing how these work together.
3. Ever-Changing Workloads
Cloud assets can be deployed or decommissioned quickly and en masse; traditional security tools cannot effectively enforce protection policies in an ever-evolving, dynamic, and fluid environment.
4. DevOps SecurityOps Automation
DevOps culture - which emphasizes highly automated Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment processes - demands organizations identify and incorporate appropriate security controls early in the development process to prevent security-related changes from compromising an organization and delaying time to market.
5. Granular Privileges and Key Management
Cloud user roles may be configured in an insufficiently restrictive manner, giving away privileges beyond what their intended purposes or requirements may necessitate. Untrained users or those without business reasons to add or delete database assets may receive write/delete permission without proper training. At the same time, improperly configured keys or privileges could expose session security risks at an application level.
6. Complex Environments
Establishing and managing security within hybrid and multi cloud environments favored by enterprises today requires tools and methods that work consistently across public cloud providers, private cloud providers, on-premise installations (such as branch office edge protection for geographically dispersed organizations) as well as on-premise deployments ( including branch office edge protection for geographically distributed organizations).
7. Cloud Compliance and Governance
Cloud providers align themselves with well-recognized accreditation programs like PCI, HIPAA, GDPR and NIST 800-53. Customers remain responsible for assuring that workloads and data processing comply with these laws; limited visibility into cloud environments makes it almost impossible to conduct an audit without tools that perform continuous checks for compliance and send real-time alerts about incorrect configurations.
8. Insufficient Visibility
It's easy to forget who is accessing your data and how, as third parties and outside corporate networks can access many cloud services.
9. Multitenancy
Malicious hackers will likely compromise your services as collateral damage while targeting other companies.
10. Shadow IT and Access Management
Cloud environments can present a challenge to enterprises that are accustomed to managing and restricting access points on-premises. It can be dangerous to organizations that don't implement bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and permit unfiltered cloud access from any device.
11. Compliance
Regulatory compliance management is often a confusing issue for businesses using hybrid or public cloud environments. The enterprise is still responsible for the overall privacy and security of data. However, relying heavily on third-party solutions can cause costly compliance issues.
12. Misconfigurations
86% of breaches were due to misconfigured assets, making inadvertent users a major issue in cloud computing environments. Some examples of misconfigurations include not creating privacy settings or leaving the default passwords.
Read More: Understanding Cloud Security Best Practices
Cloud Security: The Six Pillars of Robust Cloud Security
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform provide native cloud security features; however, third-party solutions must also be utilized to protect enterprise workloads against data breaches, targeted attacks and other cloud threats. An integrated hybrid security stack combining native/third-party solutions provides visibility as well as policy granular control required for meeting industry best practices such as those listed here:
1. Policy-based IAM Controls and Authentication Across Complex Infrastructures
As part of your IAM update process, consider working with roles and groups rather than individual IAM profiles to simplify managing access rights to APIs and assets necessary for each role or group to do its task efficiently. When the privileges increase, so does the authentication level - don't neglect good IAM practices such as password policies and permission timeouts when updating IAM policies!
2. Cloud Network Security Controls Across logically Separate Networks and Micro-segments
Take advantage of logically separated sections to efficiently deploy business-critical apps and resources, such as Virtual Private Clouds, vNETs and Azure Virtual Private Clouds. Subnets may be used to isolate workloads; subnet gateways allow granular policies. Hybrid architectures utilize dedicated WAN connections and user-defined static routing configurations for more flexible control over accessing virtual device virtual network gateways and public IP addresses.
3. Implement Policies And Procedures For Virtual Server Protection, Such As Software Upgrades And Change Management
Cloud security providers provide comprehensive Cloud Security Posture Management systems. This involves applying governance and compliance templates and rules when provisioning virtual machines, auditing configurations for deviations from standard practice, and automatically remedying them as required.
4. Protecting Cloud Native Distributed Applications and all Other Web-based Apps with the Next Generation of Web Application Firewall
Inspection and control of web traffic at an individual page level; automatic updating of WAF rules in response to changes in visitor behaviors; closer integration into microservice-driven workloads and deployment nearer their origination point.
5. Data Protection
Data protection can be improved through encryption on all levels of transportation, protected file sharing and communication, compliance risk management that continues, and maintaining good storage resource hygiene by detecting misconfiguration buckets or terminating orphan resources.
6. Detects and Mitigates known and Unknown Threats in Real Time
Cloud security vendors from third parties can add context to logs generated by cloud native systems by intelligently correlating these logs with internal information collected through asset management, configuration scanning and vulnerability scans. External data such as geolocation databases and threat intelligence feeds from public feeds are considered tools that aid visualization of the threat landscape, promote fast incident response times and detect unknown threats through AI-powered anomaly detection algorithms. These threats go through forensic analysis to create risk profiles before real-time alerts about policy breaches or intrusions may reduce time to remedy even initiating auto-remediation workflows.
Cloud Computing: Things to Consider Before Moving to it
Are You Thinking About Moving Your Business to the Cloud? Here Are Points You Should Keep In Mind Before Doing So
1. What will you do with the cloud?
Cloud technology can be deployed in various forms and for different uses; therefore, businesses must understand why and the potential advantages they can expect when migrating their operations to the cloud. Here are some common cloud technologies and what they offer businesses like yours.
Hosted email
If your website is hosted through an external provider, hosted email is likely already an integral component. To keep things streamlined and manageable, migrate all emails onto one dedicated server as soon as possible by moving over your emails into the cloud.
Disaster Recovery
Backup data has become essential to the success of any business, with cloud technology offering extra protection by storing vital files outside your office building, away from theft, fires and natural disasters that might affect physical office spaces.
Servers for Companies
Assuming you already possess a server that runs multiple applications and manages your network, and stores data, as your business grows, you may require additional servers and hardware purchases - or in many instances, cloud-based technologies may even replace on-premise server technology, making networking simpler to manage remotely than ever.
Software Application
Software on one Computer per employee has become obsolete, as most applications now reside in the cloud for easier licensing control and wider access. Microsoft 365 enables your staff to access Microsoft Office programs such as Word and Excel anywhere with internet connectivity; additional providers offer cloud-based software solutions for accounting, CRM and custom applications.
2. Understanding the Benefits of Cloud Computing
Cloud technology gives users access to documents anytime from anywhere - be it their laptops at work or smartphones while away. This accessibility often results in increased productivity and better resource management.
3. Collaboration and Sharing
Five years ago, cloud technology would have seemed far-fetched; now, however, it offers endless opportunities for collaboration and sharing - no longer do documents need to be emailed as attachments; now, users can edit documents directly via cloud services!
4. What is the Best Deployment Model?
Cloud service application providers typically offer three deployment models - Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service and Software as a Service - all providing different degrees of flexibility, control and management. Each option offers control over resources and market speed; IaaS provides more control than PaaS with faster market speeds but may limit computing resources or technical capabilities; finally, SaaS allows rapid deployment but may limit control and flexibility over applications you develop.
Selecting an optimal model may become much simpler if your organization has defined goals. By understanding each model's differences and their application to your requirements, selecting one supporting objective becomes far less daunting.
5. Take Security Consideration
As files move to the cloud, their importance increases exponentially when protecting sensitive information. New policies must be put in place that permit sharing while simultaneously protecting it.
Before moving your services to a cloud service provider, inquire about security. This step should be undertaken if your industry demands that user data remain confidential, such as legal, accounting or medical fields. Carefully read any agreements from cloud providers regarding security policies, as this may prove particularly pertinent in these industries.
Questions to ask cloud service providers:
- What is the location of their data center?
- How and who can gain access to the data center?
- How do you prevent hackers or unauthorized users from accessing your system?
- Does the service provider inform you in case of a security breach?
- Does the service provider have a current security audit? If so, will it share with you the results of the audit?
What Will You Do With Your Cloud Services?
Although small businesses can deploy cloud services, rapid technological advances may complicate the process.
Consider working with an IT service provider to make the transition between infrastructures as smooth and seamless as possible. A cloud-savvy provider will offer ongoing support, helping ensure your technology works flawlessly for the organization.
There's no question about it; cloud services are here to stay and offer many business possibilities. As a Microsoft Silver Certified Small and Midmarket Solutions Provider, Computer is fully qualified to offer hosted services through Microsoft's platform; furthermore, Computer's team of Cloud Service Providers have been approved and authorized by numerous organizations ensuring an easy transition into cloud-based solutions, that enable agility, cost reduction and efficiency within any organization. Contact today and witness how Cloud-based solutions can make a positive difference.
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Conclusion
Everyone involved with cloud computing must play their part to manage security effectively, from service users and providers alike. Everyone must collaborate closely in addressing any security incidents quickly and proactively - you need to know which information can be shared by each vendor, how that process occurs and which providers offer additional support if any arise.
Cloud Computing Service Providers frequently discuss cloud security. Their primary aim is for their customers to comprehend how the services can protect them fully; their vendors' reputable security tools would enable small businesses to reduce the risks of migrating data and applications to the cloud.
