The COVID-19 pandemic offered the cloud an unexpected boost, as it proved to be the most important enabler for business continuity, bringing a slew of solutions to help businesses weather the storms of 2020. Remote access, security, resilience, and cost were among the maintenance-related cloud requirements that helped businesses stay afloat.
Organizations have been seen adopting the cloud to achieve progressive priorities like speed, scale, and capacity. In the new hybrid world, the cloud was employed to build new business models and to deliver products and services to customers. Enterprises’ effort to drive business has been hastened by the cloud’s omnipresent reach, as well as its collaboration and AI-led analytics capabilities.
As cloud usage grows, businesses will need to interact with external stakeholders such as partners and vendors who require access to cloud-hosted applications. As a result, the IT environment is extremely vulnerable to cyber-attacks.
The vulnerabilities of a cloud-first, boundary-less organization
In a cloud-based environment, cybersecurity architecture, operations, and compliance should be given more thought. Ineffective security controls result from enterprises’ failure to transfer standard security architecture from on-premises to the cloud. Since many cloud attacks are opportunistic, there is a high risk of a security breach owing to misconfiguration and insufficient change control.
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Traditional cybersecurity controls have Limitations
Traditional cybersecurity solutions are built with traditional data assets, data flow, and access management in mind. These are usually constrained to a company’s perimeter and installed on fully regulated physical assets. Traditional controls fall woefully short in the cloud since cybersecurity is a shared responsibility between the cloud provider and the cloud consumer. Cyber-attacks, on the other hand, are becoming more inventive and causing more damage.
Here are some crucial things to think about when putting together a cloud cybersecurity strategy:
Strategy for risk assessment and architecture
The first step in developing an integrated cybersecurity strategy is to develop a comprehensive cloud strategy that includes a cybersecurity risk assessment. Risks linked with cloud providers should be investigated for regulatory compliance and reporting, as well as technical and operational KPIs. Security monitoring, incident response, vulnerability management, and overall risk management of cloud assets are all capabilities that need to be expanded. The security posture will be strengthened further by cloud API, container, and serverless security.
Approach to security through design
The enterprise cloud strategy should follow the secure-by-design approach. This means that the security architecture and governance teams need to collaborate closely with the cloud strategy team to ensure that cloud-native security measures like cloud firewalls and DDOS protection are included in the cloud foundation. Integrating cybersecurity into DevOps operations and container security is another great practice.
Cloud logs/event monitoring solutions should be integrated into the broader security incident response process. Securing data at the source can greatly minimize risks. Data loss can be reduced by improved data encryption, database activity monitoring, tokenization, and masking methods. Determining KPIs, meeting regulatory standards, and extending on-premises additional controls to the cloud all help to improve security posture.
Framework for zero-trust security
A zero-trust security framework enables full enterprise security control, from fundamental servers and networks through governance, reporting, and compliance. Defense-in-depth is provided by Zero Trust micro-segmentation and workload protection solutions.
Also Read: Setting Practical Time Frames to Remedy Security Vulnerabilities
Security operations in the next generation
Cloud providers have increased their security portfolios in response to enterprises evaluating hyperscalers for sophisticated requirements such as OT/IoT, data analytics, or high-performance computing. This contributes to everything from fundamental business security to threat and vulnerability management and compliance reporting.
Integrated security monitoring, cyber-intelligence-driven proactive defense, detection, and response, and risk-based vulnerability management can all be supported by next-generation security operations with a platform-centric strategy. When new innovative solutions such as confidential computing emerge, they should be examined.
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