Cloud computing is gaining popularity as businesses worldwide are increasingly relying on it to operate their business. It’s greatly known for its advanced security services. There are well-laid procedures that secure its environment against external and internal cybersecurity threats.
Securing these cloud services for your organization is critical in outwitting even the most sophisticated cyber criminals and keeping the clients’ data safe. It’s vital to note the security of this environment differs based on the type of cloud computing types being used. The main types include.
Private cloud services
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These services are operated by a public provider. Private cloud services provide a computing environment to only one client. The main benefits of these services include ease of service delivery, scalability, and elasticity with access control and resource customization. Together with cloud-based email security solutions, the clients are assured of optimum security for all files they are sharing.
Most customers choose the private cloud over the public because it’s easier to meet regulatory compliance requirements. Others opt for this type because their workloads involve dealing with confidential documents, medical records, and intellectual property.
Public cloud services
Public cloud services are operated by a public service provider, including software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and infrastructure-as-a-service. These services are available to anyone who wants to use or purchase them. Sometimes they may be sold on-demand or be free.
Unlike private type, customers who use the public cloud do not incur the expensive costs of purchasing and maintaining on-premise hardware and any other software application. In this case, the service provider is held responsible for the management and maintenance of the system.
Hybrid cloud services
This is a combination of both private and public computing services. As a company manager, you can use hybrid cloud services to optimize security operations and access to your data. Most operations involve the internal staff and, optionally, the public provider. Hybrid cloud networking is one of the most secure technologies you can use in your organization.
Companies that invest in cloud mining can use these services to increase interoperability and scale their operations. Investing in cryptocurrencies requires a lot of resources and greater security as there are a lot of cyber-attackers targeting these investments. Still, you can easily replicate on-premises workloads and backup data.
The type of cloud computing used depends on the needs of the organization and the level of security needed. Here are the main tactics that are used to protect the cloud.
End-to-end security monitoring
Having an antivirus program and some internal security processes is not enough to defend your company against all kinds of security breaches and cyberattacks. That’s why there is a need for the organization to have the right technology stack and skilled team to help achieve the company’s security goals.
To be precise, it’s very challenging to achieve the correct visibility, and without this, there will be no efficiency. There are three main elements that you can use to ensure that you have top security in your company.
You should have good cyber threat intelligence, a technological stack, and efficient monitoring systems. If possible, it would be great to have threat modeling based on real-life threat intelligence to access all suspicious activities.
A risk-based approach to vulnerability management
To be effective in protecting your cloud, you need to pursue a risk-based approach to vulnerability management. There is a general tendency for most companies to pay more attention to zero days vulnerabilities and carry out a simple scanning process. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. You need to ensure that you carry out the scanning process effectively.
This will help you identify areas of real threat. You need to evaluate and prioritize threats based on how easily they can be exploited and weaponized against your company. You will implement the necessary controls for the vulnerabilities that imminent attackers can exploit in the current IT environment.
Develop a concept-privileged identity and access management
When using cloud services, it’s vital to assign and manage access to company data. This prevents data leaks and breaches in the company. Ensure that you develop a dedicated concept for the privileged identity and access management that includes authorizations, roles, and identity separation of duties.
You can develop dedicated monitoring for the customers’ environment. Direct integrations to the security monitoring platform should also be monitored to ensure that there are no hackers who can infiltrate your environment easily.
Automate incident process
Any security threat needs to be detected early and reported to the right security team to take the right action. The best way to achieve this is by integrating the root-cause analysis needs with the security monitoring architecture. Automation increases the analysis process and response to the incidents.
Ensure that you keep the relevant data for historical correlation and identification of the clow attacks. The greater the visibility, the tighter the security of the stored data. That’s because the security team can easily compare and know which areas require a lot of attention to prevent a potential data breach.
For all organizations, some key challenges appear when using these tactics to ensure adequate cloud security. And they include:
Increased surface attack
Research shows that the public environment is one of the main attractive attack surfaces for most attackers. That’s primarily due to ingress ports that are not 100%. Attackers disrupt the work synchronization of the system and corrupt data.
Lack of visibility and tracking
With the IaaS model, the providers will have complete control over the infrastructure layer and rarely expose it to the clients. This is further extended in SaaS and PaaS models. For this reason, most customers find it challenging to identify and quantify their environments.
Ever-changing workloads
Most of the cloud assets are provisioned and decommissioned dynamically. That’s at a scale and velocity. With the ever-changing workloads, it’s very challenging for most of the protection policies to offer adequate protection for the data stored in the systems. This poses a significant security challenge for most organizations.
Conclusion
Cloud computing technology has really improved the security of data systems. That’s why most organizations that use this technology are more secure than those using traditional systems.
