With exponential growth in enterprise data moving to the cloud and a surge in cyberattacks at the same time, what are the decisive solutions that businesses need to implement to combat the cloud security challenges? Let’s discover.
Cloud Security Trends and Implications
2018 witnessed high-profile breaches involving cloud environments and none of the breaches were due to the oversight of the cloud service providers.
It has implications for security in 2019 as well. While many areas are vying for the attention, the following trends will shape cloud security landscape in 2019:
- Account compromises may increase in scale and velocity
- Violation of compliance and regulatory actions will remain on the upswing
- Continuous monitoring will prove crucial from holistic security, compliance, and risk management perspective
- Vulnerability management will continue to improve
- Managed container services will grow, but security risks will remain
- These trends indicate that enterprises should refocus their efforts on keeping their workload and data safe.
Top Cloud Security
Concerns The above-mentioned security trends increase the apprehension among enterprises about operating in the cloud, due to the fear of becoming the next security breach headline. These headlines do create an uproar, but do not depict the full picture when it comes to cloud security.
This can lead to misconceptions that could alter the perception of enterprises and often cause them to make poor decisions. Therefore, understanding the security concerns in a cloud is an important first step to securing an organization’s cloud presence.
1. Lack of Visibility and Control
A business can fail to identify potential risks due to the lack of visibility in the cloud. A loss of visibility can mean a loss of control over several aspects of IT management and data security. Cloud adoption in some sectors, such as media, is as low as 17%, which has been blamed on lack of visibility and control.
2. Data Breach
Although clouds are more secure than traditional IT approaches and cloud service providers provide meticulous security measures, a data breach can occur due to malicious and invasive action by cybercriminals. The number and scope of data breaches are growing every year, and no industry is safe.
3. Data Loss
Enterprises put massive amounts of data on a cloud. Loss of data can happen when someone gains access to the sensitive business information or personal information of millions of people. This can cause loss of customer confidence which, in turn, results in the loss of revenue. Sometimes depending on the kind of data loss, it could lead to legal issues.
4. Non-compliance with Regulatory Mandates
Enterprises are concerned about guaranteeing compliance with regulatory mandates like PCI DSS, HIPAA, GLBA, FISMA, etc., if their data is in the cloud. A security breach that leads to non-compliance with a regulatory mandate can result in expensive penalties, lawsuits, and loss of business.
5. Inadequate Access Management
Even the most advanced cloud providers cannot protect users from cybercriminals who have system access. A lack of efficient identity access management systems and multi-factor authentication failure causes a serious security threat.
6. Denial of Service (DoS)Attacks
A DoS attack shuts down a machine or network and deprives legitimate users of the service or resource. This is accomplished by flooding the target with traffic or send a piece of information that will trigger a crash. DoS attacks typically do not result in theft or loss of data but can cost the victim a great deal of time and money to handle. DoS attacks often target high-profile entities like banking, commerce, government, and trade organizations.
Tips to Boost Security OperationsThe rise of cybercrime continues to accelerate. Given this apparent reality, the practical tips discussed below will help enterprises to combat this persistent and growing threat.
1. Mature Vulnerability Management System
Part of the actions in the effort to keep businesses safe from threats is to have good visibility over the company’s security posture. An effective Vulnerability Management process is a good way to bring visibility.
Moving from a non-existent or early vulnerability maturity model to a maturity model tailored to your needs will align your IT and information security in the direction of strategic business goals.
2. Continuous Compliance Monitoring
Continuous Compliance Monitoring is a process where an enterprise can define each of its IT systems, categorize it by risk level, apply the appropriate controls and continuously monitor the controls in place and assess their effectiveness against threats in their environment.
A cutting-edge continuous compliance monitoring approach closes the attacker’s window of opportunity.
3. Control on Cloud Infrastructure
Cloud adds additional complexity due to multiple services and entry points. Frequent system changes without authorization can cause system downtime and security breaches from internal and external threats while decreasing overall operational efficiency.
Having a nodal point to carry out change controls will eliminate an unprecedented level of eliminating unauthorized changes to avoid any service outage or security breach.
4. Progressive Tools for Threat Identification
As businesses move to heterogeneous clouds, growing complexities makes it impossible to understand the cyber-exposure a business might have.
Collating and indexing all the cyber exposure vectors after analysis based on their potential for compromise can help assess the cyber exposure index at any given point in time. This will enable businesses to have an accurate, objective and detailed measurement of cyber exposure to prioritize and act on remediation options.
Conclusion
While cloud service providers are responsible for protecting the cloud infrastructure, customers must monitor other vulnerabilities as attackers will look for easy targets, regardless of whether they are public, private, or hybrid.
Integrated or unified security solutions that provide visibility across the organization’s services could be the best defense.