In today’s fast-paced digital world, the promise of increased scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency makes cloud adoption a compelling prospect for many businesses. With worldwide cloud infrastructure spending predicted to top $1 trillion by 2024, it’s clear that the powerful technology is here to stay.
One of the main reasons that businesses adopt the cloud is for simplified data storage, processing, and management capabilities. In fact, 60% of the world’s corporate data is hosted in the cloud.
However, as attack surfaces keep growing, breaches get more sophisticated, and the value of sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII) grows on the black market, businesses must urgently address vulnerabilities and risks to secure their cloud environments.
So, what steps can you take to safeguard your company’s sensitive and critical information? In this article, we’ll briefly explore the evolution of cloud security and dive into a few best practices to help you ensure the safety of your data.
The Evolution of Cloud Security
As cloud technology has matured, so have the security approaches designed to protect it.
Traditionally, cybersecurity was centered around the concept of perimeter security, which refers to tools such as firewalls and antivirus software. However, the cloud-driven, distributed nature of today’s business networks has rendered that approach obsolete, as it is designed to protect a specific physical location, like an office or campus.
Since then, the cloud security market has evolved to incorporate more extensive approaches to authentication and authorization, such as Zero Trust Network Access and Secure Access Service Edge.
Nevertheless, these advanced threat prevention models, which get more sophisticated daily, barely keep pace with evolving attack techniques. Let’s take a look at a few best practices and foundational measures that you can use to fortify your cloud security strategy—regardless of the technology you’re using.
- Cloud Encryption
As the cornerstone of cloud security, encryption is one of the most effective methods of protecting data in the cloud. It protects valuable information from unauthorized access by transforming plaintext data into undecipherable ciphertext. In this way, the information becomes useless to any hacker who manages to access it.
The method works by protecting data in two different states:
- Data at rest:
Information can be accessed by authorized users directly from cloud storage, a physical data center, or other sources. However, this also makes it vulnerable in the event of a network breach or ransomware attack. That’s where encryption at rest comes in. Using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), a symmetric block cipher algorithm, users can encode data and use a single key to decode it when they need to.
- Data in transit:
When data is being moved between storage locations, like devices or servers, it is at high risk of unauthorized access. To prevent interception or eavesdropping by bad actors, Transport Layer Security (TLS) or Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocols are commonly employed.
Homomorphic encryption takes the concept one step further, adding an extra layer of security to the data protection process. Using this method, classified information can be analyzed, processed, or worked with—without the need for decryption.
When applied to scenarios in which users may not be allowed to see the data in its original form, it is an effective way to keep specific information private. Examples include e-voting or certain financial transactions. It is particularly useful in cases where individuals are working with sensitive information in untrusted environments.
- Identity and Access Management
In a cloud environment, identity and access management (IAM) tools enable a business to comprehensively manage user identities, define access permissions, and monitor all user activity on the network. With this level of control over who views different types of resources, IT and security teams gain much-needed visibility into the potential risks and threats across their infrastructure.
Further development in the IAM landscape has led to the creation of role-based access control and attribute-based access control (ABAC).
Role-based access control (RBAC)
RBAC helps security and IT teams define specific roles, such as administrators, developers, or analysts, and assign unique permissions that apply to each different role.
This approach simplifies access management by associating permissions with predefined titles instead of individual users and enforcing the principle of least privilege—which restricts users’ access to certain information and resources, reducing the risk of unauthorized access or data breaches.
Attribute-based access control (ABAC)
ABAC offers more granular permissions controls, enabling access to data based on characteristics such as department, sensitivity level, or location. The advantages of ABAC are its context-awareness, ability to make precise access decisions, and adaptability to evolving business dynamics, including different buildings or physical environments.
To maximize data protection capabilities in cloud environments, many companies opt for a hybrid access management approach that combines RBAC and ABAC elements.
Most cloud service providers offer tools and platforms that enable organizations to implement both access control models across their IT infrastructures.
- Zero Trust Security
Zero Trust represents a fundamental paradigm shift in security for IT environments. It is a set of guiding principles that challenges the traditional perimeter-based security approach, which is rendered ineffective in ever-shifting IT infrastructures that are spread across different locations.
Building on the concept of role-based access control, which should be part of your cybersecurity strategy, Zero Trust operates on the premise that no user, device, or system should have automatic trust. Furthermore, individuals must continuously verify their identity and security posture before accessing the data or network.
In the cloud, where data traverses across networks and various devices, Zero Trust’s emphasis on rigorous identity verification, strict access controls, and continuous monitoring makes it a go-to for modern businesses looking to secure their cloud environments.
This approach forms an essential foundation for robust cloud data protection, aligning security measures with the dynamic and distributed nature of modern cloud ecosystems.
Additional Considerations to Safeguard Your Data in the Cloud
Ensure that you have a data backup and recovery plan
Various types of potential disruptions put cloud data at risk. These include system failures, accidental deletions, or ransomware attacks. Therefore, it’s critical to employ a resilient backup strategy that goes beyond the 3-2-1 approach, to ensure business continuity with a dynamic IT infrastructure capable of recovering assets swiftly and effectively from multiple sources.
Implement proactive threat detection and response tools
Threat detection powered by AI and machine learning has emerged as an effective tool to help companies analyze vast data sets and identify potential security risks in real-time. When managing a cloud environment, the efficiency and accuracy offered by such tools are extremely beneficial and can help alleviate the burden on today’s security teams.
The advantages include:
Align security protocols with compliance regulations
Maintaining compliance with industry standards and regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation and ISO/IEC 27001, is key. Adhering to these laws can help businesses govern cloud-based data while staying in line with the latest procedures and practices to develop a strong security posture in their cloud environments.
Conclusion
In pursuit of comprehensive data security across your cloud infrastructure, these three strategies and further considerations are not just recommended; they’re a necessity. With advanced measures for implementing data encryption, access management, and Zero Trust security, your company can navigate the complexities of the cloud with confidence.
