Organizations can reduce attack surfaces and mitigate cloud risks by better understanding how clouds are created, connected, and managed.
Businesses are investing in several cloud solutions to support growth and modernize legacy apps for a wider audience. The road to achievement, however, might be paved with errors and unknowns that pose an excessive risk. The complexity of cloud environments is often increased because of custom code, APIs, and other techniques.
This growing complexity has the potential to raise risk and expose businesses to cyber-attacks significantly. Cloud risk is compounded as complexity rises with new services and capabilities. Organizations can cloud reduce risks and attack surfaces by better understanding how clouds are connected and managed.
Situational Awareness is Necessary
Measurement is one of the most crucial tools for properly managing a complex cloud environment. Businesses must take the essential step of measuring their infrastructure by creating an inventory of applications, systems, and users.
Also Read: Securing IT Infrastructure from Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) Attacks
Measurement can be done in various ways, from manually taking inventory to using automated tools to facilitate the process. Most businesses choose to combine the two. Choosing the right management and monitoring tools might be challenging, particularly in hybrid and multi-cloud systems. These environments utilize APIs to integrate various technologies and typically have their own management and monitoring tools. Too many tools can make it difficult to be aware of the current situation, increasing cloud risk.
A single source of truth must be created to remediate risk, necessitating new management and monitoring systems properly. These tools can eliminate the silos brought about by various technologies while also providing a unified view of the organization’s infrastructure. However, individuals often draw an incorrect parallel between managing numerous data centers and deploying multiple clouds, which might result in the wrong tools being chosen. Since data center and cloud management require different skill sets and tools, mistakes could be made during implementation. It may be necessary for businesses to invest in new tools or hire specialists to integrate the tools.
Reducing Errors
In a rush to implement cloud solutions, many ignore what may be clear to seasoned specialists. Setting goals and creating plans are necessary for reducing errors. The business case, the stakeholders, and the expected outcomes must all be understood by those who are deploying to the cloud.
It is easy to disregard security best practices when using the cloud because of its flexibility and speed. Plans incorporating cybersecurity as early as possible are crucial for establishing those practices. Actions like adding a new feature or allowing access will expand the attack surfaces and the cloud risk involved if there are no adequate cybersecurity safeguards in place.
Simply adding external users can increase the risk of an attack and cause unanticipated cybersecurity problems. Businesses must carefully assess the overall impact of allowing that access, whether the third party can access confidential information or make unauthorized modifications, and how those user credentials are being safeguarded.
A few best practices organizations can follow are developing security policy, auditing access, implementing multifactor authentication, and being aware of threat environments. To ensure that cloud risks are addressed before they have an impact, some companies will need to train their internal workforce or consult with outside experts.
Adopting a Continuous Process
Organizations must make risk mitigation as flexible as the cloud to secure the cloud; a set-and-forget strategy is no longer sufficient. Additionally, developers, today can constantly modify, expand and update the cloud environment. Organizations must be proactive and establish processes and controls to minimize cloud risk.
Organizations can add security to the development process by implementing continuous processes that integrate controls into the design and deployment phases. However, maintaining security measures can be a time-consuming effort, ultimately slowing down the pace at which change is enabled. Here, automation lessens the workload related to cloud cybersecurity.
Adopting hybrid, multi-cloud, or public cloud solutions does not have to be intimidating. By creating policies and controls and utilizing automation at the start of cloud adoption, businesses can ease the move to the cloud and eliminate unnecessary risks.
Also Read: How Enterprises Can Ensure Cloud Security in 2022
Having a firm grasp of cloud management is beneficial when further reducing cloud risk. Additionally, companies may be able to uncover new opportunities with the right tools in place, which will help grow the business.
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