The Covid-19 pandemic brought new life to the cloud, enabling them with unprecedented capabilities that are essential in today’s society. Cloud solutions allowed businesses of all sizes become more resilient and efficient during this time; it is a no brainer for how they will continue supporting your company through 2020 disruptions!
The Covid-19 epidemic gave the cloud an unexpected shot in the arm as it proved to be one of its biggest enablers for business continuity. Through remote access options, security measures, resilience features and cost control tactics companies can sustain their businesses without too much turbulence on major disruption like what we’ve seen over these past few years ̶ even before 2020 hits.
Though the public cloud is often perceived as a defensive strategy, it can also be used offensively for organizations to take their products and services to customers in new markets. This has been shown by an increasing number of enterprises using the technology with newer business models that would have otherwise taken years or decades to implement without agility gained via hybrid computing solutions like AWS Cloud Computing Services. Gartner predicts India’s end-user spending on these technologies will grow year over year at 31% from 2021 onwards, showcasing this trend once again.
Cloud adoption is on the rise, and this means that enterprises will often be working outside of their own networks. They’ll interact with partners and vendors who need access to cloud-hosted apps – which could mean a much more vulnerable IT landscape for businesses due to cyberattacks.
The vulnerabilities of a cloud-first and boundary less enterprise
Cybersecurity is becoming more and more important in the cloud-based world. Traditional security architecture that doesn’t consider virtualization, multi-tenancy, or rapid provisioning can lead to ineffective security controls. There are high chances of a breach due to misconfiguration such as failing to update passwords regularly or not creating new infrastructure needed for change control when onboarding customers–especially because many attacks come from an opportunistic perspective and may have been planned before being detected by their target company’s defenders.
Cloud API gateways are providing a single point of entry into their cloud services, but the gateway becomes vulnerable and is constantly being targeted.
As the risks of unauthorized use in cloud services increase, many organizations are moving workloads off-prem to their own private clouds. Cloud computing is on a paradigm shift from public providers that offer easy and inexpensive PaaS and SaaS products to an organization’s own private provider with security controls.
Many organizations have migrated workloads away from traditional data centers (on-prem) towards more flexible options like Private Clouds or Public Clouds which often come at less cost than running your IT infrastructure yourself. But as Service Providers get better at providing cheap and simple solutions for hosting applications externally – known as Shadow IT – it becomes too hard not just for businesses but also government agencies; these service providers create a situation where you can’t control everything anymore.
Limitations of Traditional Cybersecurity Controls
In a recent study, 66% of respondents believe that traditional security solutions either do not work or have limited functionality in the cloud. This is due to factors such as data flow being unrestricted by perimeter restrictions and deployed on fully controlled physical assets. When it comes to cybersecurity in the cloud scenario, both providers and consumers share responsibility which means controls are woefully inadequate for this type of situation; thus proving how outdated they really are.
As per a recent report from Cloud Security Research Initiative (CSRI), 66% of respondents believed that traditional security solutions don’t hold up under certain conditions like when considering issues with information flow – especially because these types of strategies were designed keeping company-owned resources within their own boundaries where there’s no threat coming into them.
The risks of storing data on the cloud drive home the importance of establishing secure governance where cybersecurity risk assessment, architecture compliance and assurance are an integral part to your overall strategy.
An Integrated Cloud Cybersecurity Strategy
Important considerations for building an integrated cloud cybersecurity strategy are:
Risk Assessment and Architecture strategy
A comprehensive cloud strategy with cybersecurity risk assessment is the first step to creating an integrated security plan for your organization. Risks associated with Cloud providers must be studied and analyzed, as well as being in compliance with regulatory mandates and meeting technical KPIs. Organizations need capabilities such as expanded monitoring of cyber threats ; responding appropriately if incidents occur; vulnerability management systems that strengthen their security posture by proactively identifying weaknesses before a breach occurs or system failure from malicious data manipulation/destruction; while simultaneously maintaining overall control over risks within other IT infrastructure assets—such protection measures are often overlooked but essential when investigating how best to deploy new technologies inside any enterprise’s network environment.
Secure by Design Approach
A secure by design principle must be applied to the enterprise cloud strategy. This means security architecture and governance teams must work closely with the cloud strategy team to ensure that in addition to traditional firewalls, or DDOS protection, new features like a “cloud firewall” are implemented as well for an additional layer of safety from external threats.
Another best practice is to embed cybersecurity in the DevOps processes and container security. By ensuring that data at source are protected, risks can be reduced significantly as well. Enhanced solutions for encryption, database activity monitoring, tokenization or masking will help minimize your company’s risk of data loss which leads to a more secure system overall.
To prevent data loss, it is important to embed a cloud-based incident response plan into your business continuity strategy as well as implement enhanced solutions for encryption, database activity monitoring, tokenization and masking of sensitive information before entering the third party environment where you would not have direct control over these factors.
Access Controls and Segmentation
Organizations must enhance data security with encryption, classification, leakage prevention and recovery capabilities. Extending these features to Multi Factor Authentication (MFA), privilege admins, or key vaults are the new mandates in order to keep your company safe from malicious individuals that may try and infiltrate what should be private information for you.
Zero Trust Security Framework
Implementing Zero Trust Security ensures that a comprehensive enterprise security control is extended from basic servers and networks to governance, compliance, and reporting. Solutions such as micro-segmentation involve network design with the goal of limiting access to only what’s needed while workload protection solutions help reduce risk in any situation by shielding data right at its source – on endpoints including mobile devices, laptops or desktops.
NextGen Security Operations
With organizations evaluating hyperscalers for complex requirements such as OT/IOT, data analytics or high-performance computing cloud providers have expanded their security portfolios. This helps ensure basic enterprise grade security to comprehensive threat and vulnerability management in an effort to provide the best service possible. Nextgen security operations with a platform-centric approach can support the adoption of integrated services like monitoring detection and response that also includes cyber intelligence driven proactive defense which is designed from risk based vulnerability management.
With these measures, organizations can make the most of cloud without worrying about security.
