Data breaches on the cloud are oftentimes in the news. However, the reasons for data breaches are frequently ambiguous — a “misconfigured database,” “an open resource,” or mismanagement by an anonymous “third party.” The uncertainty around these breaches can make security businesses appear riskier than it is.
According to Gartner, “Is the cloud secure?”, 90% of firms that fail to regulate public cloud utilization would share critical data inappropriately by 2025. It’s not the cloud provider’s fault in nearly every example people read about in the news; it’s the organizations using the cloud who fail to manage the safeguards meant to protect an organization’s data.
Controlling who has access to data has become a critical component of any data security and compliance program. Although each cloud provider provides services and APIs to manage identity and access to information for their stack, these services and APIs are not standardized across all public cloud stacks, do not address third-party data repositories, and frequently require the usage of low-level tools and APIs. Strong cloud security, according to many experts, is based on widespread acceptance of the identity and data strategy.
To protect cloud data, security teams can take the following three steps:
Integrate data security into the software development lifecycle (SDLC)
Enterprises can continuously identify, manage, and monitor the behavior of every unique person and non-person identity functioning in their clouds using an SDLC strategy. It ensures that security and infrastructure teams are alerted to regions of unusual or excessive danger. Discover risk by determining who (people) and non-people (identities) are doing what (access/actions), where (resources), and when (context) across the public cloud infrastructure; classify and manage risk to least privilege by ensuring identities have only the permissions required to perform daily tasks and no more; and monitor risk by continuously monitoring changes in identity activity (context/behaving).
Find out what the company’s risk is
A system that can abstract, collect, normalize, and report historical identification activity in a single, unified, consumable manner is required in hybrid and multi-cloud contexts. Organizations can only begin to recognize and minimize the risk of over-permissioned identities once they have this clarity and knowledge.
Through risk and security monitoring, compliance enforcement, drift detection, DevSecOps multi-cloud efficiency, and misconfiguration prevention, an identity and data solution should decrease risk, ensure compliance, and boost operational efficiencies.
Risk classification and management
Identity and data security for the firm should provide context with combined visibility of current and previous activity data, as well as a simple remediation or prevention remediation. Although each cloud provider provides services and APIs for managing identity and data access for their stack, they are not standardized across all stacks, do not handle third-party data stores, and frequently necessitate the usage of low-level tools and APIs. Through normalized views and management of cloud identity and data access, an identity and data platform should be able to overcome this problem.
Also Read: Addressing New and Evolved Security Challenges of “Work-from-Anywhere” Environment
The platform should have safeguards in place to account for the differences in how cloud service providers manage threats posed by identities and excessive permissions, which can differ from one provider to the next. Organizations should, for example, be able to create or design unique least privilege roles based on the past activity of one or more identities or remove unused or dormant rights from a high-risk identity directly.
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