Thanks to many companies moving their operations online amidst COVID-19, a fast-developing work-from-home culture brought about exponential growth in cloud technology. Building upon new technology entails associated security risks, and the cloud is no exception.
The figures behind the risk
With a $250 billion global market predicted to grow at an annual rate of 15%, cloud has become an inevitable next step. Over 80% of enterprise workloads already run on cloud technology, 41% of them on public cloud systems. Security remains one of the biggest concerns when upgrading to an enterprise cloud platform.
Best practices
Encrypt sensitive data
This seems trivial and is one of the most overlooked steps. Around half of databases remain open to external attack through poor or absent encryption.
Fortify vulnerable hosts
Since dynamic IP addresses and cloud resources are constantly created, correlate your vulnerability data with configuration data to identify vulnerable hosts in your public cloud setup.
Set up access control
Access control for cloud databases is crucial to ensuring data is not shared across unapproved devices, and it protects from internal misuse by keeping access to sensitive data limited or view-only.
Identify malicious user behaviour
Mishandling of cloud data by untrained employees, or external attacks, show up as malicious user behaviour. User behaviour analytics is the step that identifies those actions before they become breaches.
Educate employees
A generic but important factor: security training helps staff identify and act on cloud breaches and other threats faster.
Four trends
AI in cloud security
Massive amounts of data can be sifted and analyzed to sort them into blocks with increasing levels of security as needed. Data based on previous breaches can be used to set up early warning systems for unknown threats.
Zero-trust network access over VPNs
ZTNA lets companies exercise remote control over applications by hiding them behind a secure provider's cloud service, which fends off remote attacks by attackers using or hiding behind a VPN service.
Automating security tasks
Delegating routine upkeep of a cybersecurity network to machine-learning applications reduces the load on strained cloud networks.
Cloud-native security becomes prominent
Cloud computing is no longer the domain of small startups. Larger organizations, financial services, banking and government offices are investing, which will push traditional security vendors into cloud security and bring new companies catering solely to it.
Where we come in
Our Oracle and Microsoft expertise has lent us years of experience delivering customized cloud solutions. Keeping in mind price-sensitive markets for small and medium-sized businesses, we help develop a clear roadmap to enter or upgrade a cloud platform.