BotNet News

The massive shift to remote work has made employees reliant on cloud services, creating new vulnerabilities and targets for cybercriminals. Whether the cloud is hosting data storage or business applications, it must be protected with strong security controls designed for the unique security challenges of the cloud.

Effective cloud security focuses on establishing secure connections to the cloud and protecting data and applications that reside within it. Cloud security solutions must also be able to adapt and scale rapidly in response to organizational change. This is a challenge given that many IT tools are architected for on-premise environments and may be incompatible with the cloud, leading to visibility and control gaps.

Often the infrastructure and hardware that hosts cloud applications is maintained by the service provider, making it easier for threat actors to target those components. In addition, multitenancy introduces the risk that a single weak point in the infrastructure can compromise all of the customers’ systems.

To protect against these risks, secure connections to the cloud must be established with SSL/TLS. Strong cryptography encrypts data and communications, which makes it much more difficult for hackers to intercept and decipher. In addition, all systems and applications in the cloud should be grouped and secured using best practices such as least privilege and identity management.

Similarly, it is important to prevent shadow IT by educating employees and implementing acceptable use policies that require authorization for all cloud applications used for work. Cloud users should also implement a policy to use only approved and certified software and ensure that passwords are strong (using a mix of letters, numbers and special characters).