As more organizations adopt cloud-based technologies and services, ensuring proper security measures are in place to protect cloud environments is increasingly important. However, many businesses still fail to implement best practices for cloud security.
In this article, we’ll explore why prioritizing cloud security is critical, common risks associated with insecure cloud usage, and recommendations for building a strong defensive posture in the cloud. By making security a foundational design principle, companies can help protect their data, applications and workflows hosted in public, private and hybrid clouds.
Shared Responsibility Security Model
It’s important to understand that cloud security is a shared model between the cloud provider and customer. Providers are responsible for securing the underlying cloud infrastructure, while customers own securing workloads and data within it.
This shared security model requires comprehensive protection strategies that go beyond basic access controls and extend to operations like identity management, encryption, activity monitoring and more.
Top Cloud Security Risks
Threats like data breaches, account compromise, insecure interfaces and misconfigurations can emerge when security best practices are not followed. Attackers also target cloud platforms for vulnerabilities, insecure deployments and exposed credentials or services.
Businesses assume risks around compliance, operational outages or being embroiled in legal issues if security controls in their cloud usage are lax. Compromised environments may also be leveraged for attacking other cloud customers.
Best Practices for Cloud Security
Key practices include access control policies, multifactor authentication, encrypted data at rest and in transit, activity monitoring and logging, infrastructure as code, secure deployment configs, network protections, vulnerability management and incident response plans.
Security should be embedded in every phase — from build to run. A zero-trust approach along with user training and governance help drive security as a shared responsibility with providers. With sound security policies and controls, businesses can unlock the benefits of cloud confidently.
Cloud platforms deliver incredible scalability and flexibility, but require heightened diligence on security. By applying cloud security best practices, companies can help protect their critical data and workloads in public, private or hybrid cloud deployments.
