Cloud Security – How to Secure a Business in the Cloud
Cloud Security is a set of policies, controls, procedures and technologies that protect cloud-based systems, data, infrastructure, applications and users from threats and attacks. It encompasses multiple layers of protection to help secure a business in the cloud, ranging from authentication and access control to monitoring and alerting. Its multi-layered approach allows companies to monitor cloud resources in real time for unauthorized activity or deviations from best practices and provides the ability to quickly detect and respond to incidents.
The security measures in the cloud differ from those in on-premises data centers and must be carefully configured and implemented to ensure a secure environment. These include:
Continuous Monitoring: Continuous monitoring of the cloud is essential, enabling the detection of anomalous activity and potential breaches. Companies can use cloud-native or third-party tools to monitor all aspects of data and system events, including additions and changes. In addition, they should utilize techniques that reduce overhead and provide more granularity to the detection process.
Encryption: The most effective cloud security measures are those that encrypt data, both at rest and in motion, to keep it out of the hands of hackers or even cloud service providers. This is especially important for organizations that use a public cloud or a private cloud that is not controlled by the organization itself.
Advanced Threat Detection: Emerging threats can occur in cloud environments due to new vulnerabilities discovered in apps, OSes and VMs or physical network infrastructure components like NAS/SAN devices. To combat these threats, organizations should implement an extended detection and response (XDR) solution to automatically scan and analyze for threats, alerting them of any suspicious behavior and proactively responding.