Cloud computing has become the common term used across organisations and companies are adopting to various service offerings to increase the availability, scalability, and boundaries. Several cloud services are readily available for businesses to improve their day-to-day operations, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Azure Sentinel and other Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers. As most of the companies rely on cloud-based technology, as remote working has become the new normalcy of delivering services, however, it’s so crucial to ensure systems are secure and confidential data remains protected. Adapting to Cloud services is not a threat or dangerous, but there are some data security weaknesses that businesses should be mindful of and understand how to build the network with robust security measures to protect data.
While bringing this sudden change in adapting to cloud globally has been beneficial to continue services without disruptions, increase the scalability, maintain business continuity, and developed the availability of services beyond boundaries. However, this rapid change has brought in multiple security and data protection issues during the digital transformation. Cyber security becomes a critical concern as more companies complete their digital transformation and migrate systems/applications/data to the cloud. As the threat environment is constantly growing, it is critical to reduce the risk of cloud computing as much as possible and ensure data and systems are protected at rest, in use, and in transit. If the cloud undergoes any kind of attacks/malware/ransomware, there is a huge loss on data , reputation and continuing the business without impact.
As per recent surveys, the average cost of a data breach is ranging between 8-10 million and it typically takes around 220 days for an organization to detect, remediate, and recover. Additionally, many organizations are forced to shut down as it becomes difficult to continue services and survive. Cloud computing security risks are evolving day by day and the organizations are working with cloud service providers to eradicate vulnerabilities.
Some of the major cloud risks are –
The cybersecurity industry is always shifting as new technological innovations emerge and modify firms’ security practices. Organizations across all industry sectors must empower their IT departments to improve their cybersecurity architecture as well as provide pertinent training programs to all important decision-makers in the corporation. Organizations must safeguard their data, assets and ensure that their employees are constantly rained and prepared to manage a cyber-attack / data breach/ransomware to reduce business impact and avoid losses.
Some of the ways to protect the data and assets that drives your business -
1. Strong Access Controls – Privilege Authentication and Authorization
As an organization expands and develop across various regions, its common that employees count increases and level of access differs. It’s very important that the organization restricts access to only the people who really need the tools/applications to do their job.
2. Continuous Monitoring - Monitor End User Activities with automation
Continuous monitoring and analysing the end user activities is very critical to business that will help the organization to spot unusual behaviours and irregularities that differ from usual process/delivery
3. Data Encryption
Data encryption is one of the vital requirements for any cloud security environment. It really helps the organization to protect the data at rest, in use, and in transit to and from the cloud.
4. Reduce supplier dependencies
In the current organizations set up, dependencies on suppliers/3rd parties have increased significantly to increase the delivery scope, however, it is very important to understand and enable on how much access suppliers/contracts need on the enterprise data/ tools to restrict access and empower service deliverables.
5. Back up data
One way of protecting the data is by backing up the data on an ongoing basis to reduce data loss and increase business resilience.
6. Training and Awareness
Employees working from home tend to be more vulnerable to phishing attacks, cyber threats, malwares, and other vulnerabilities evolving day by day. Hence, organizations should consider building awareness and training for all their employees as one of their key activities to secure the business environment. Cloud computing provides various benefits to businesses including access to data virtually, irrespective of the place, without needing to maintain a server or physical infrastructure. However, accessing data virtually accompanies with business-critical risks which needs to be addressed and prevented using robust security controls. A cyber incident/ransomware attack/data breaches in clouds are not rare to de-prioritize/ignore, the key is in making sure you know what to do when it happens and being able to safeguard the data in cloud/on-premises by enabling robust cybersecurity controls to prevent the network from any kind of attacks.
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