A paradigm shift towards enterprise adoption of cloud was first triggered by earlier adopters like Netflix, Spotify, and others. But, the real push for cloud migrations has been the recent pandemic. As most of the enterprises needed to have remote capabilities, the shift towards cloud-based operations became crucial.

However, the push for the cloud needs an equally well-designed security architecture. The reason is simple; organizations shift their data to the cloud and exchange information remotely. According to a report, remote working has attracted many attacks on cybersecurity for enterprises. Apart from remote working, cloud security is also crucial for user’s data privacy and compliance.

The state of the cloud security report by Sophos in 2020 suggests that about 70% of organizations hosting data or workloads on a public cloud service have faced a security incident in the last year. At the same time, organizations using multi-cloud services have reported such incidents twice that of public clouds.

So, cloud security is not an optional element in your digital transformation journey. Here, we discuss practical ways to create a cloud security strategy to help your business ensure secure operations.

There are three fundamental elements in any cloud-based operations that you need to secure,

1. Data

2. Platform

3. Users

The first step towards formulating a successful cloud security strategy is to assess the existing systems, data sensitivity, and user authentication policies. Assessment of your data and systems needs a framework with predefined metrics.

For example, identifying sensitive data needs to assess the existing infrastructure, core services, and critical access policies. There are authentication protocols for sensitive data access which need to be tested before migration. Understanding the fundamentals is essential to your cloud security measures. To identify the sensitive data and assess the system, you need to bifurcate the services and data crucial to business operations to deploy an IAM system.

Identity and Access Management

Every organization should have a sound Identity and Access Management system to ensure control of the information access. While some cloud providers offer in-built IAM systems like AWS, others may integrate your IAM directly with their services.

An IAM allows organizations to control access to vital data through multi-factor authentication and security policies. It also allows you to control how users will access your data and in what way they can use it.

This is extremely important for websites that deal with phishing attacks. With the IAM system integrated into your websites hosted on the cloud and assurance of web service security, data thefts can be minimized.

Threat Intelligence

Threat Intelligence, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) are pillars of any cloud security system. The first pillar is threat intelligence that deals with the crucial information for organizations to understand the nature of threats on their systems. Once you know the kind of cyber threat, devising a security policy to avoid such attacks becomes a little easy.

At the same time, IDS is a software application that monitors the network for any malicious activity or violation of security policies. Every policy violation is logged into an event management system that immediately triggers action according to security measures. IDS that can respond to the intrusions detected during the process of logging are known as IPS.

Vulnerability and Penetration Testing

Both vulnerability assessments and penetration tests are essential to cloud security. Vulnerability assessments are done through scanners that assess your apps and websites for potential vulnerabilities. When you plan your web development stack based on cloud technology, secure tools become necessary to ensure complete protection. One such secure tool is the vulnerability scan.

A penetration test also referred to as pentest, is a manual process of conducting an assessment on a target to understand the level of vulnerability by exploiting cloud apps to an ethical hack. It allows organizations to analyze the resiliency of cloud security against malicious penetrations.

Workload Isolation

Most organizations rely on firewalls, virtual local area networks, and access control lists for securing their network through segmentation. It is a process where workloads are segmented into smaller units, and individual security policies apply to each of them.

Due to network virtualization, micro-segmentation in cloud security has been enhanced and offers better protection to the systems. While traditional threat protection systems like IPS offer protection against the network traffic in one direction, micro-segmentation can provide security in the multi-direction data flow.

Many organizations struggle to have an in-house skillset for such micro-segmentation and choose to outsource the development of apps for security reasons. Isolation of workloads is an excellent approach for applying security policies and migration purposes as it reduces the overhead of migrating everything together.

Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)

A CASB or Cloud Access Security Broker is like software that acts as a protective layer between the cloud service clients and users. It is primarily an excellent option for a hybrid approach where you have core security policies stored at on-premise infrastructure and employ them on the workloads on assets that are in the cloud storage.

Source: https://kinsta.com/blog/cloud-security/

CASB offers protection to your data that moves between the on-premise infrastructure and cloud-native applications. There are three ways in which you can deploy a CASB

1. Reverse Proxy- A reverse proxy broker acts as a layer of protection between theuser application and cloud services. It hides the information with the data that is offered from the internet to an app’s interface. Cloud security is offered in a line of internet traffic.

2. Forward Proxy- It also offers similar protection in line with traffic like reverse proxy but operates between you sitting behind the firewall and internet.

3. API Mode- API or Application Programming Interface allows organizations to directly integrate security policies with cloud services. It helps in securing the managed and unmanaged traffic on a cloud network. APIs are essential to have interactions between heterogeneous systems and here it enables management of the network data transmission.

Ensuring Compliance

Compliance is one of the most crucial activities, whether you are developing a cloud-native application or migrating to cloud services. There are many different data regulations like DLP, HIPAA, SOX, PCI DSS, and others. For example, European Union has its set of data regulations defined by GDPR which you have to follow for operating in Europe. Data access broker systems and tools like CASB can help you ensure compliance with such data regulations.

Conclusion

Apart from the strategies that we discussed here, there are many other approaches that you can deploy for cloud security. It is not an optional element anymore, and with the increasing malware attacks, you will need reliable security solutions for cloud deployments. At the same time, strategizing cloud security and ensuring the formulation of policies need extensive planning.

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Source: https://datafloq.com/read/cloud-security-101-how-ensure-enterprise-grade-secure-ops/15659