How to Stop Worrying About Cloud Security?

Almost every business has adopted cloud technology to varying degrees. However, with this rapid adoption rate of cloud, comes the necessity to confirm that the organization’s cloud security strategy is accomplished of defending against the top threats to cloud security. The gap in cloud security confidence is still a major concern for organizations. Most of the surveys today, report that about 90 percent of the IT Heads raise concerns about Public Cloud Security.

Why is Cloud Security Still a Concern?

Though cloud providers offer increasingly robust security measures, organizations hold the sole responsibility to secure their workloads over the cloud. Cloud providers, such as AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle, IBM Cloud, Alibaba, and Salesforce, have made significant investments to sustain emerging security threats. They also provide an extensive identity and access management (IAM) infrastructure, but enterprises still need to do their part.

About 94% of companies are worried about cloud security. As per a survey on the biggest security threats facing public clouds, companies ranked misconfiguration as the highest concern, followed by unauthorized access, insecure interfaces, and hijacking of accounts. Here we discuss the top cloud security threats and concerns in the market today.

Following are the major security concerns in cloud migration:

• Lack of visibility
• Data loss and leakage risks
• loss of control
• Legal and regulatory compliance
• The traditional data center security patterns are no longer effective in the public cloud. But when properly secured, public Cloud infrastructure is proven to be more secure than traditional enterprise data centers.

Following are a few questions, that every security professional must look into before migrating workloads to the cloud.

• How do cloud providers fit into your threat model?
• Are your data and systems interesting enough for actors who might want to access the public cloud?
• What regulations are you under?
• Does the cloud provide mechanisms to protect against or mitigate risks from your threat model?

How to Stop Worrying About Your Public Cloud Security? 

For most of the organizations that are using the public cloud for infrastructure as a service, security is a major concern. While there are so many ways to address these concerns, but the simplest way is to move less sensitive data and applications over the public cloud. In the case of moving mission-critical applications to the cloud, organizations need to add additional security measures on top of what cloud service providers provide. 

Following are some of the foundational security practices to make the cloud more secure than an organization’s data center:

Shared Responsibility Model for Cloud Security

Cloud security is a shared responsibility between the cloud service provider and the customer, Cloud service providers are responsible for the security “of” the cloud and the Customers are responsible for security “in” the cloud. The shared responsibility model has three categories, they are the responsibilities that are always taken care of by the customer, responsibilities that are always taken care of by the Cloud service providers, and responsibilities that depend on the service model: Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Layered Security Approach

Organizations need to deploy a layered security approach that addresses Hybrid IT infrastructure as a whole. Most of the cloud service providers offer smart authentication services for public cloud instances, but a third-party security vendor like Cymune will facilitate adding a further layer of authentication, without compromising the application performance.

Right Third-Party Auditing Services

Opting for third-party auditing services helps organizations in systematically evaluate the security standards, processes, and procedures at a CSP. By these organizations will gain the comfort level required to migrate a lot of sensitive applications and data to the cloud with confidence.

Effective Cloud SLA Monitoring

In a traditional data center approach, security professionals have the tools to identify when and where security breaches occur. But in the case of the public cloud, organizations don’t have an idea of these kinds of security breaches.

Organizations cannot trust the Public cloud security guaranteed by the cloud service providers unless they are properly documented as Service Level Agreement and unless there is transparent monitoring and reporting over the workloads.

Visibility

Gaining visibility into both application and data traffic must be the topmost priority for organizations. It is most important for organizations to ensure that there is no blind spot in their cloud environment. A comprehensive cloud visibility service can facilitate organizations in identifying the source of malicious traffic and performance degradation.

Streamline Logging and Monitoring

Cloud environments are highly dynamic and are hard to monitor because users can deploy new infrastructure on demand at any moment. An autonomous solution is a need of the hour for organizations to react instantaneously to these changes. Monitoring solutions must be able to correlate against higher-level metadata. Exploring the logging and monitoring practices provided by cloud service providers is another key for organizations to ensure public cloud security.

Know What Cymune Does in the Cloud Security Space:

Today using public cloud services for managing your infrastructure, be it applications or other workloads makes your business more flexible and economic, but with cloud also comes a rapidly evolving IT security landscape that you need to be prepared to deal with. You need to protect what you deploy from the ever-rampant cyber threats and attacks while maintaining the elasticity of your business needs.

The Flight to the Cloud Presents Two Essential Security Challenges:

How do you enable users to access the cloud securely?

How do you secure applications deployed in the cloud?

While many organizations still continue to use the older approach to cloud security which involves the use of many disparate point products, which increases cost and complexity for organizations and ultimately exposes them to unnecessary risk.

At Cymune we take a different approach. We believe that your workloads require an integrated security approach with 24/7 Cloud security monitoring to protect your users and data in real time. We believe in securing the cloud from the inside out by providing the most comprehensive cloud security in the industry. We can help you protect your users, applications, data, and users no matter where they are located.