November 30, 2022
In our last blog, we discussed how cloud services have become an essential part of business, and why that has introduced many security issues. We touched on a few basic precautions, but now we’re going to go into additional important methods for securing your data on the cloud — which should all be used in conjunction.
The Importance of Data Encryption
The ability to easily store or transfer data is one of the main benefits of using cloud applications, but for organizations that want to ensure the security of their data, its processes shouldn’t involve simply uploading data to the cloud and forgetting about it. There’s an extra step that businesses can take to protect any data uploaded to cloud services: encryption.
Just as when it’s stored on regular PCs and servers, encrypting the data renders it unreadable — concealing it to unauthorized or malicious users. Some cloud providers automatically provide this service, employing end-to-end protection of data to and from the cloud, as well as inside it — preventing it from being manipulated or stolen.
The Importance of Software Updates
Like other applications, cloud applications can receive software updates as vendors develop and apply fixes to make their products function better. However, just because an application is hosted by a cloud provider, that doesn’t make it invulnerable to security vulnerabilities and cyberattacks. Therefore, these updates often contain critical patches for severe security vulnerabilities
Critical security patches for VPN and RDP applications have been released by vendors to fix security vulnerabilities that put organizations at risk of cyberattacks. If these aren’t applied quickly enough, there’s the potential for cyber criminals to abuse these services as an entry point to the network that can be exploited for further cyberattacks.
Cybersecurity agencies like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) often issue alerts about cyber attackers exploiting particular vulnerabilities. If the vulnerability hasn’t already been patched, then organizations should react to the alerts immediately and apply the updates.
The Importance of CSPM Tools
Companies are using ever more cloud services. Keeping track of each cloud app or cloud server ever used is difficult. And yet, there is a staggering number of instances of corporate data left exposed by poor use of cloud security — a number which is exponentially growing.
A cloud service can be left open and exposed without an organization even knowing about it. Exposed public cloud storage resources can be discovered by attackers and that can put the whole organization at risk. In these circumstances, it could be useful to employ cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools. These can help organizations identify and remediate potential security issues around misconfiguration and compliance in the cloud, providing a means of reducing the attack surface available to hackers to examine, and helping to keep the cloud infrastructure secure against potential attacks and data breaches.
CSPM is an automated procedure, and the use of automated management tools can help security teams stay on top of alerts and developments. Cloud infrastructure can be vast and having to manually comb through the services to find errors and abnormalities would be too much for a human — especially if there are dozens of different cloud services on the network. Automating those processes can help keep the cloud environment secure.
In our final blog in the cloud security series, we’ll share additional essential tools for maintaining adequate cloud security. If you have questions regarding any of the above methods or require assistance with implementation, contact us today.