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May 4, 2021 - by Synoptek
Despite the clear, unmatched promise of cloud, a large percentage of organizations continue to dodge cloud adoption because they are unsure about the security of and in the cloud. At the same time, organizations who have embraced cloud are struggling to achieve full value from their cloud investments, mainly because CIOs are challenged by weaknesses in cloud security and compliance. Although cloud vendors are driving continuous efforts in improving security, the concern that cloud may not be secure by design have put organizations in a big fix!
Now more than ever, organizations need to take a cloud-first approach to enable business agility and resilience while accelerating their digital transformation journey. While cloud opens doors to several new opportunities to modernize services and transform operations, companies are unable to drive maximum ROI, mainly because of security and compliance barriers that come in the way. When combined with the problems in proactively addressing the complexity of a secure configuration and the shortage of the right skillsets, these challenges act as major roadblocks to a cloud-first journey. Here’s why cloud security is important for businesses today:
Cloud vendors are constantly working towards integrating multiple levels of controls within the cloud infrastructure. Yet, cloud is notoriously known for its poor security stance, with default settings highly unlikely to satisfy even the most elementary security requirements of any business today. Although security is often seen as the biggest impediment to cloud adoption, in reality, it can actually turn out to be the biggest throttle. Here are some cloud security best practices you should keep in mind:
Despite the efforts cloud vendors are driving towards implementing control-based safeguards and guardrails to protect organizations from leakage, theft, or data loss, organizations must understand that cloud security is a shared responsibility. The highest level of security can only be achieved when organizations too put in efforts in deploying basic security controls and ensuring the security of their data and workloads in the cloud through secure processes and practices.
Although it is advisable to leverage the capabilities of an expert cloud provider to configure cloud, organizations often find themselves struggling with cloud security due to poor configuration. Since misconfiguration can open doors to several cloud-native breaches, allowing attackers to successfully launch and attack and exploit data, when setting up your cloud infrastructure, make sure to configure cloud assets properly and have an appropriate change management mechanism in place to make easy and quick configuration changes, if necessary.
In addition to deploying the right security controls, it is also important to educate teams on the importance of cloud security. Training teams on cloud security best practices and enabling easy access to updated security documentation can empower employees to more easily spot security issues and act with caution – when in doubt.
Since data in the cloud is just as vulnerable to hacking and misuse as on-premises, it is critical to have strong access control measures in place. Such measures can allow you to spell out the roles that are authorized to operate in the cloud environment as well as the activities they are allowed to do – thus protecting critical data from unauthorized access or misuse.
Like every IT system or application, make sure to proactively monitor and track your cloud environment for evolving threats, issues, and risks using automated security tools. Constant monitoring can make it easy for you to identify security and compliance gaps, plan for their resolution, and establish the right security practices that can help optimize your cloud technology investments.
Although most cloud models today are built with a range of modern and updated security measures that are designed to protect cloud-based infrastructure, applications, and data, cloud security is as much a responsibility of the organization adopting it as it is of the vendor providing it. Since the right security controls can ensure authentication of users and devices, control access to data and resources, and safeguard the business from internal or external threats, it is important to take cloud security extremely seriously – not just to maximize cloud ROI but also for the long-term success of the business.
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