Setting high cloud security standards is crucial for businesses to survive in the highly volatile digital world. Cloud-enabled workloads act as a shadow for a business IT and data environment to benefit businesses in multiple ways. With advantages come challenges and disadvantages. Continue reading to read the advanced cloud security challenges and best practices for cloud security improvement.

What is Cloud Security?

As businesses drive towards a digital transformation strategy, they need to empower their infrastructure with cloud-enabled tools and services. This propels malicious activities in the cloud environment. Cloud security networks bring together technology and processes to ensure that businesses are secured from internal and external security threats. The need for change gives way to cloud migration and digital transformation. It helps organizations balance their productivity and security by optimizing their operational approach. However, it has its own implications that may affect the capabilities of businesses. This accentuates the deployment of best cloud security practices to allow cloud technologies to benefit modern-day enterprises.

Why is Cloud Security Essential?

The revolution brought in by technology has resulted in a major shift to cloud-based environments and computing models. Though this migration has resulted in scaling applications and services, but it also presented potential challenges for enterprises to meet. Organizations depend upon these service models to offload complex tasks and dynamic infrastructure management. However, the accompanying risks can’t be ignored. Keeping this in view and understanding security concerns is necessary to safeguard data theft. Besides, third-party cloud computing providers are responsible for infrastructure management and but they may or may not be responsible for asset security and accountability, even if they follow best security practices. And hence, organizations should watch over data, applications, and workloads on the cloud on their own. Public cloud computing providers have data from multiple organizations and hence are targeted by malicious security attackers explicitly. Also, organizations are not given access or visibility to data, and due to this, the organizations face governance and compliance risks when managing client information. This affects the very core of client-organization relations. Insecure APIs, exfiltration of sensitive data and misconfiguration of cloud platforms are seen as major cloud security threats. To prevail against modern-day cyberattackers, CS emerges as an essential aspect to set up countermeasures. No matter whether you perform your organizational operations in the public, private or hybrid cloud environment, implementing cloud security solutions is necessary to ensure business stability.

Some of the Cloud Security Challenges or Concerns that need Immediate Attention are:

Data Breaches

Data breaches are common among too-large and too-scale-sized organizations. Organizations pick third-party service providers to run their app on hybrid or public cloud, however, they can’t interfere with the data security measures they take. Make sure that the cloud computing service provider you choose offers unswerving data security.

Lack of IT Professionalism

Laxity in data security can be a result of a lack of IT expertise. Around 40% of companies believe that they lack the professional expertise required to handle complex cloud computing. Also, enterprises create a layer of complexity by having three-four clouds management, which requires technical competence and experience.

Incompliance with Regulatory Mandates

Data protection rules are introduced to ensure high-end client data security and integrity. Recreate your organizational efficiency by complying with regulatory mandates as data violation can affect our repute adversely. Businesses from industries like legal, banking, insurance, or finance should extend their limits to ensure that their client's data is safe. Industry mandates like EU data protection, PCI DSS, GLBA, HIPAA, FISMA, and FERPA should be acknowledged and address.

Unsecured APIs

With so many loopholes to garble with data security, it is always at risk. The impact of API on larger systems can be vast, serverless functions, micro-service architecture, etc. the risk comes with less-secure APIs which are highly vulnerable to be attacked by malicious hackers. Examine each application carefully to identify vulnerabilities.

Cloud Migration Issues

More and more businesses are migrating to the cloud, but its careful execution is necessary to avoid data risks. Some of the biggest challenges businesses face are failing to keep up security pace with the change in applications, setting up of security policies and visibility into infrastructure compliance. Therefore, security and IT professionals are digging more upfront strategies for a secure transition. For this, they split the migration process into phases to eliminate critical errors that may lead to data loss or other vulnerabilities. We count on Access Control, Insider Threats, Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, Misconfigurations and Inadequate Change Control, and Weak Control Plan as some of the other security issues that business owners face.

Best Practices for Cloud Security

Third-party cloud service providers usually use Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for their cloud computing services as they offer the best security practices, tools and protocols. Knowing and identifying the cloud security threats help in minimizing them at the initial stage. Assuming you have already gone through the challenges, let’s talk about best security practices for cloud computing systems.

1. Team up with a reliable cloud service provider who complies with industry standards and offers in-built cloud security protocols.
2. Get into a partnership that accounts for both the parties equally responsible for application security.
3. Train your team and users. User's systems are the first line of defence and are responsible for cyberattack exposure. Educate them to identify phishing emails, malware, and other security infringement methods.
4. Use encryption solutions to save data during data deployment. Manage Cloud Services’ Visibility of your ecosystem to execute rigid security strategies to reduce security risks.
5. Execute an endpoint security solution for advanced client-side security.
6. Introduce a strong password security policy to prevent unsolicited infringements. Secure your protection layer by implementing multi-factor authentication.
7. Reassure your security by reviewing cloud security SLAs and Contracts. The terms & conditions, annexes, and appendices should be clearly understood before proceeding.

Conclusion

In this remote era, data security concerns are next to none. Re-define your network security approach, educate your team on data security, update your security procedures regularly and implement a time-out function to nullify the chances of data theft.  If you use cloud computing services, make sure you have the right talent to work for you. Look for cloud-native and comprehensive cloud security solutions to safeguard your business assets, apps, and data from malicious intruders.