Strategies to Optimize Cloud Security

THERE ARE GENERALLY 3 PHASES IN THE CLOUD PROTECTION PROCESS:

Phase 1: Knowing the cloud risk and usage

Here, you need to recognize the regulated or sensitive data and analyze the sensitivity of the data when it is shared and accessed. Next, you must check for any unknown cloud usage and examine the IaaS configurations. This way, you can discover any suspicious user behavior which does not favor the organization.

Phase 2: Safeguarding the cloud

Implement data protection strategies and encrypt the critical data with your own codes & keys. Restrictions must be set on how the data is shared. So that, you can stop data transfer to unknown and unmanaged devices. Advanced malware protection must be applied to IaaS.

Phase 3: Handling cloud security problems

Additional verification is required to be done for high-risk access cases. Further, cloud access policies must be adjusted as per the new services coming up. At last, malware must be eradicated from the cloud service.

CLOUD & SECURITY PRACTISES

There are basic cloud protection practices that must be present in every organization.

• Selecting A Trusted & Qualified Vendor

When recruiting a cloud protection service, you must ensure that the supplier has a good market history, reputation, and quality in the industry. Therefore, before screening out a cloud vendor, carefully inspect the service level agreement, properly understand what it guarantees about and what it does not as well as properly go through all the data available on the public platforms.

Such an overview will justify greater trustworthiness in the services offered and the experience to handle the company’s requirements.

Any trusted vendor has its value reflected in the security certifications & compliances it carries. The information of any reputed vendor will be accessible by the public.

To illustrate, providers like Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, AWB, and Azure provide seamless access to their security certifications and compliances.

• Access Control Policy

Implementing security control policies on user access is also a great practice towards cloud security. This way you can control the users who want to access your cloud information.

An organization must make it clear to their employees about the responsibilities and risks of acting in bad faith and against the company protocols.

The company must make sure that only authorized people have control to access the cloud information. In fact, the individual user authentication process must only ensure access control to the cloud.

• Audit & Optimize

There must be a regular audit & verification program conducted in the security posture and infrastructure of the organization. This can be done weekly, monthly, or quarterly as per the complexity and size of the data environment. Whatever may be the time intervals, it must be ensured that the audit of cloud security is done frequently and on a consistent basis.

In this field, the Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs) can also be appointed to audit reports to be run on periodic intervals. In this way, the report will also be sent to the concerned person directly rather than setting up the same report over and over again.

With an audit, all kinds of vulnerabilities will be identified, also if any unsanctioned apps getting back into your environment, etc. Keeping a track record of these trends and risks will help you optimize the rules & policies over time.

• Educate The Users

All the stakeholders and users of the company must be trained, who can access the computer systems to safeguard cloud computing practices. Proper training must be given to them on how to identify phishing emails, detect malware, and all the risks of unsafe practices.

The training procedure of all the professionals and experts must include awareness about the threats involved in the files containing malware, malicious emails, and unknown users. It is important to train employees to the extent that they can detect threats and resolve them on their own.

• Next Generation Firewalls & Encryption

The next-generation firewalls secure the workloads using newer advanced features and traditional firewall functionalities. Traditional firewall consists of stateful inspection, IP blocking, port blocking, packet filtering, proxying, and domain name blocking. However, with the next-generation firewall, additional features like deep packet inspection, encrypted traffic analysis, intrusion prevention system, and application control are present to offer comprehensive threat protection.

Talking about encryption, it adds another surface of security to protect your database. It encodes the data when at rest as well as in transmission. The data becomes nearly impossible for anyone to access without any decryption key or code. Thus only the appointed user can access it.