Securing the cloud: How to help protect your company’s deployment

Understanding the protections your cloud providers supply — and where your organization needs to take the initiative – is mission critical. Here are eight steps you can take to stay cyber-secure in any cloud environment.

Key takeaways:

  • Cloud security is a shared responsibility. Your cloud provider protects infrastructure; your organization must maintain strong access management and data controls.
  • Your policies around identity and privilege management are crucial to maintaining security within cloud environments.
  • Planning for a breach and developing a cyber incident response plan is required of any business using cloud tools and platforms.

Cloud capabilities have become indispensable to almost every type of business. Hybrid (the use of a private and public cloud services) and multi-cloud (using more than one public cloud service) deployments provide data storage, enable real-time communication and collaboration, link disparate teams and systems and connect new devices to company networks. Cloud deployments can also scale up rapidly, which helps many companies quickly establish new connections and working conditions with partners, customers, internal teams and remote employees.

 

But these deployments also present significant cybersecurity risk from criminals who continue to exploit unpatched vulnerabilities, digital supply chains and substandard identity management. Cloud misconfigurations, shadow IT and mismanaged access can also result in lost data and compliance violations. 

 

Cloud service providers (CSPs) offer a robust security apparatus around their products and services, but these companies are not solely responsible for secure cloud deployments. As just one example, while most CSPs offer data encryption capabilities, users typically must opt in to access them.

 

Whether your company uses Software as a Service/SaaS (e.g., email or data storage), Platform as a Service/PaaS (e.g., app building kits) or Infrastructure as a Service/IaaS (e.g., hybrid or multi-cloud architectures), securing your cloud deployments is a shared responsibility between you and your CSP. Specifically, your organization must create policies and controls that protect critical data, account access and the physical security of any device connecting to your cloud.

 

As a best practice, cloud security should follow many of the same principles that govern the security of on-premises clouds and networks that are the exclusive responsibility of the enterprise. An approach that emphasizes cyber hygiene and granting access and permissions only as needed will help you cover the security basics.

 

Here are steps your organization can take to improve and maintain security in your cloud deployments:

 

A diagram of cloud security responsibilities for cloud service providers and customers.

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