Have Enterprises Established a Holistic Cloud Security Ability?

Cloud adoption has become a top order priority and to keep it useful, cloud security needs an update. Experts recommend security to include several areas of threat control

Data security threats have been the biggest reason of concern for cloud adoption. Last year, five major cloud services cyberattack exposed over 25 billion information records that included both private and privileged data.

Over 100 million consumer credit applications were out in the open because of a permissive firewall server. Analysis revealed that the cyberattacks had occurred due to configuration changes, although small, and had resulted in potential cyber threats.

Enterprises have been keen on cloud adoption without giving equal importance to cloud security. It has caused many organizations with unprotected data and assets to face cyber threats. Technology experts ask companies to work on security strategies that could identify such changes and warn them about potential threats.

More recently, cloud security has been shifted to top order priority. With several new, efficient cloud security solutions, enterprises have the liberty to choose more advanced solutions with enhanced capabilities. Today, cloud security includes several areas of threat control.

Also Read: Better Cloud Security Strategy with Data Science

Access security is one of the foremost solutions that protect individual or group access across categories. These Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) solutions are not required to adapt to any access changes across the cloud environment.

Another area of security is workload security, which includes Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP). Companies that leverage DevOps to create and launch applications rapidly, can shift the security protocols much earlier in the development process with CWPP. It could focus on infrastructure-as-code and pre-deployment vulnerability management. CWPP can also pay attention to user activity audit, runtime threat detection, and incident response for cloud workloads that are created as containerized microservices.

Handling visibility, compliance, and risk management of cloud applications are Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tools. Integrating directly with management console APIs, they can secure configuration data. These tools have the capability to automate operational monitoring, risk visualization, and risk identification across infrastructures in the cloud.

Microsoft suffered a data breach in 2020 where their customer database that stored user analytics ended up exposing 250 million entries. A CSPM solution might have prevented this cyberattack as it would have recognized the configuration change and alerted the IT security team. Experts believe that security teams should mainly focus on continuous threat detection as the cloud constantly changes. What is needed is a predictive and pre-emptive security strategy that can trigger action before the business data is exposed to cyber attackers.

Also Read: Cloud Security in 2021: Key Trends and Strategies

Apart from continuous scanning for potential threat alerts, detection can also be based on identifying anomalies and anomalous behavior that could indicate an attack. Experts suggest CSPM tools be enhanced to meet configuration compliance requirements, detect breaches at runtime, and use deep visibility to remediate known problems, at scale.

Finally, the perfect data security strategy is still a working model. As data is the most crucial element of any business, security challenges are the most critical at the granular level. Tracking and restricting data movement and encryption has to be addressed sooner.