Cloud technology has become indispensable for many organizations, however there are common mistakes and misconceptions that you should be aware of in order to keep your data secure, even as it travels off premises.
Moving to the cloud has a wealth of benefits both in terms of business resources and information. If one were to investigate the systems or applications being used by their organizations, you could guarantee that at least one is using cloud technology. And there are plenty of good reasons for it. A recent survey shows that businesses are recouping fiscal savings, seeing an accelerated time to market as well as an increased responsiveness to customer needs after moving to the cloud. This in turn promotes more revenue streams for the business, not to mention the improved overall efficiency and productivity.
Yet, despite this, the cloud is a concern for modern security professionals, particularly as more data is being stored in these architectures, leading to more data security and privacy risks. In fact, 93% of cloud deployments have been found to be running misconfigured storage services. As a result, 200 cloud security breaches have occurred since 2018, which have exposed over 30 billion data records. Given that more enterprises are looking to adopt cloud infrastructure, if these issues are not rectified, the likelihood of more breaches is high as it is clear that many enterprises are struggling to effectively secure these digital environments. This could be down to a number of reasons including, among others, a lack of visibility regarding the data or even misunderstanding how cloud providers are storing and securing data.
To help, here are three essential tips to keep in mind when moving to the cloud:
1. Chances are your CSP is only partially responsible for security.
Most cloud service providers adopt a shared responsibility model. What this means is it’s the customer’s responsibility to secure data stored in the cloud. The cloud provider will have security in place, but these need to be configured to the specifications and requirements of the customer. Of course, each cloud provider will have various security tools and capabilities which can lead many down a road of unmanageable inconsistency. You’ll have to take the time to review the configurations and can’t expect this task to be done for you.
2. Legacy, on-premises technologies are not engineered to manage and control cloud security.
More often than not, legacy security technologies will not have the required capabilities to meet the high demands of modern cloud infrastructures. For modern, cloud native environments, a new security approach is needed – one that gives total visibility, protects data throughout its lifecycle, and can enable the business to carry out its processes without compromising the data.
3. A data security expert is not automatically a cloud security expert
Have you ever gotten into an argument with someone who’s got a PhD in chemistry who thinks having a PhD in chemistry makes them an expert in topics other than chemistry? Lord knows I have. This same false sense of security can also apply to seasoned data security experts when it comes to cloud security.
Modern cloud services are more complex and these new environments demand more automation to handle the vast amounts of data. This then calls for new approaches to protect the sensitive information that resides in these channels. This alone will require deeper understanding.
To help your organization with its commitments to data security along its cloud migration journey, data-centric security should be at the forefront of any discussion. The data-centric approach will help give total visibility of data in all forms as well as protect and de-protect sensitive information based on access rights. The technology that most incorporates this high standard of protection is tokenization which negates any exposed gaps that may have appeared when using traditional security approaches. If more organizations adopt this data security strategy for their cloud environments, we will begin to see a drastic decrease in the number of cloud security incidences.
