Cloud security is a set of practices used to protect data, applications, and systems in the cloud from cyberthreats. These practices apply access controls, encryption, and monitoring to ensure data privacy and integrity, ensure regulatory compliance, and prevent abuse of resources.
Ideally, cloud security practices, and any tools used to employ protections, are managed and operated from a centralized dashboard for greater efficiency and standardization. This article discusses the importance of cloud security, explains basic concepts in cybersecurity technology, and offers a review of risks and appropriate mitigation.
Why Is Cloud Security Important?
Many organizations are now using cloud-based services and are storing large amounts of valuable data in these services. This data makes clouds an appealing target for attackers and the connected nature of the cloud makes services accessible targets.
If services are left unprotected, attackers can easily steal or manipulate data or gain access to wider systems. The appeal of cloud services for attackers puts your data, your brand reputation, and your customers at risk. It also opens you to substantial financial liability and compliance fines.
Cyber security threats continue to increase
Driven by the tempting nature of cloud targets and the advance of cloud protections, criminals are consistently developing new methods of attack. This leads to an increase in the total volume of attacks as well as the complexity of attacks. As evidence of this, a recent report by (ISC) found that 28% of businesses faced a cloud security incident in 2019.
Cloud Security Technologies
When working to protect your cloud services, there are a variety of technologies you can use. The most common of these include:
- Identity management-helps you manage user roles and permissions. Typically cloud providers either provide a proprietary identity management system or integrate an existing system, such as Active Directory (AD). Many providers also enable you to bring your own tools and federate management across your systems.
- Vulnerability and penetration testing-tools that enable you to scan and test cloud configurations and accessibility from the perspective of users. These tools enable you to simulate an attack and identify vulnerabilities before attackers do.
- Data encryption-enables you to obscure data so that only users with the correct decryption key can access contents. Encryption should be applied to both at-rest and in-transit data. Common methods include attribute-based encryption (ABE), key-policy ABE (KP-ABE), and ciphertext-policy ABE (CP-ABE).
- Business continuity and data recovery-includes data duplication, backups, and failovers. These practices ensure that data and services remain available despite disasters, hardware failures, or attacks.
- Cloud security posture management (CSPM)-CSPM is a practice that enables you to manage security and the handling of misconfigurations. It is particularly helpful for large, hybrid, and multi-cloud deployments which are otherwise too complex to manage effectively. Often, CSPM is accomplished with third-party CSPM tools that you can integrate across services and environments.
Cloud Security Risks and Threats in 2020
To avoid the risks affecting cloud services you need to understand where threats lie and how those threats occur. Below are some of the most common issues faced and how to prevent harm caused by these issues.
Data Misuse
Unfortunately, many users don’t understand what is happening to their data once it is in the cloud. The resources that data is stored in may change dynamically due to scaling, auto-tiering, and data duplication. At the same time, users from throughout an organization may be accessing and altering data without cloud administrators or other users being aware of it.
Data may also be at risk from users sharing passwords or using unprotected personal devices to access cloud services. When administrators don’t understand where data is stored, how it is stored, who is accessing it, or how, they cannot keep data secure. They also cannot ensure that legitimate access remains available.
Preventing data misuse
To prevent data misuse or loss, you need to have a clear understanding of how cloud resources work. This includes any automatic data replication that is happening, how resources scale and what configurations added resources have, and what data movement is allowed. You also need to create and enforce policies that control data access. This includes who is allowed access, what they can do with that access, and from which devices they are allowed to access.
Network outage
The connectivity that makes clouds such valuable tools can also make cloud services a nightmare. If you have all of your mission-critical data and applications in the cloud these resources are typically ensured to be highly available. However, if you are having Internet connectivity issues this availability means nothing. Without a connection, you have temporarily lost your most valuable resources.
Even on a less severe scale, this can cause significant issues. For example, the massive increase of work from home created by Covid-10. Many organizations are not prepared to suddenly have their networks strained by large numbers of VPN connections. Likewise, many workers’ home internet connections are not fast enough to allow for effectively connecting to cloud resources, particularly when the number of active users is taxing available bandwidth.
Preventing lack of access due to networking
While you may not be able to prevent network issues, you can take steps to ensure that your data remains available to you in times of outage. Keeping copies of your most frequently accessed data on-site can ensure that at least some employees can continue working.
Another option is to have a failover network connection using a different technology, such as mobile data or cable lines. While these may not match your primary network, limited access is better than none and can get you through until primary service is returned.
Insecure APIs
Application user interfaces (APIs) are the primary method used to connect and communicate with resources within cloud infrastructures. APIs are accessed both internally, by cloud services and externally by web and mobile applications.
The most common issues faced with APIs include:
- Anonymous or unrestricted access which doesn’t require credentials
- Lack of visibility or monitoring
- Brute force attacks exploiting simple passwords or reusable tokens
- Lack of encryption or displaying secrets in URLs
Preventing API insecurities
There are several methods you can use to ensure that your APIs are secure, starting with access restrictions. Apply authentication measures such as multi-factor authentication to ensure that users are legitimate. You should also ensure that all requests are sent via encrypted channels, such as SSL or TLS channels.
After your restrictions are set, consider performing penetration testing. This testing enables you to access APIs from a user perspective and can help you uncover where protections are lacking. It can also help you uncover if secrets are being exposed or if unintended access is granted.
Compliance Violations
In the last few years, regulatory compliance has become more restrictive. Customers are demanding more privacy for their data and governing bodies are responding by implementing fines and sanctions to protect this privacy. Unfortunately, ensuring compliance with these restrictions in the cloud can be a challenge.
Cloud data is often spread across multiple regions, is accessed by more third-party providers, and can be easier to steal if proper security measures aren’t in place. Additionally, while cloud vendors may meet certain compliance requirements, it is not always clear which ones.
Preventing compliance violations
The most important part of preventing compliance violations is understanding which regulations apply to you and under what circumstances. This typically requires seeking advice from legal counsel, which can help you interpret regulations and implications. You also need to ensure that you fully understand how your cloud provider meets compliance and how not.
If you are unsure if services comply or you know that services don’t, you need to find an alternative. Often, this means keeping regulated data on-premises where you have greater control over it. Regardless of how or where you store data, however, you need to ensure that data is monitored and that access is auditable. This ensures that you can prove compliance and respond quickly if regulations are broken.
Conclusion
In an increasingly digitized world, cybersecurity – and particularly cloud security – is crucial for safe usage of data and applications. There are countless vulnerabilities, to the point you need a vulnerability database just to keep track of each method your system could be exploited.
Data misuse, network outage, insecure APIs, and compliance violations are amongst the top grave concerns impacting cloud environments. But not all is lost. You can take charge of these risks before they turn into breaches, by implementing DLP, access control, backup and recovery strategies, multicloud infrastructure, and using SSL and TSL channels for API requests.
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About the Author
I’m an electronics engineer with a Master’s Degree from Be’er Sheva University, a big data and web analytics specialist, and also a technology writer. In my writing I cover subjects ranging from cloud computing to agile development to cybersecurity and deep learning.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eddiesegal/
