What is Cloud Security?
Cloud Security is a complex discipline that combines technologies, controls, processes, and policies to protect your cloud-based systems, data, and infrastructure. It is a shared responsibility between you and your cloud service provider to keep your business safe from the reputational, financial, and legal ramifications of a data breach.
Scalability – One of the main benefits of cloud computing is its ability to quickly scale resources up or down, based on demand. This allows an organization to easily manage spikes in workloads and seasonal changes.
Privacy & Compliance – Many organizations use cloud services to store customer information, which must be stored and handled in accordance with various regulations. These include the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (FISMA), and Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998.
Insider Threats – A growing problem is employees using personal devices to access company data or networks outside of their job duties. This can lead to a wide range of threats including malicious actors, ransomware attacks, and theft of credentials.
Misconfigurations – The number one vulnerability to data breaches in the cloud is misconfigurations. These vulnerabilities result in overly permissive privileges on accounts, insufficient logging and other security gaps that expose organizations to cloud breaches, insider threats and adversaries who leverage vulnerabilities to gain access to data.
Often, these vulnerabilities occur without malware. Instead, they are the result of user error or a failure to implement security best practices.