What is cloud computing security?

2023 01 12 · 3 min read

As malicious hackers continue working on more innovative and larger cyber attacks, only a few companies are in a hurry to take security precautions. One effective way for companies seeking solid information security is to move their digital solutions to the public cloud.    

Today, nearly one in two organisations keep their data in the public cloud, and more than half of the same report respondents plan to move at least some sensitive data to the cloud. These numbers are also forecasted to grow during 2023. Therefore, we see increasing trust in cloud providers’ capabilities to provide the proper cloud security since more organisations choose to keep their data in the public cloud.  

This blog post explains what cloud security is, how cloud providers reduce security risks and what security activities you can activate in the cloud, ensuring best practices and the latest trends. 

How to define cloud security? 

Cloud computing security, also shortly known as cloud security, describes a collection of practices, policies, technologies and services that help to protect your cloud data, applications and infrastructure from cyber attacks or minimise its risks. 

Cloud security is crucial for companies implementing various digital transformation processes and using managed cloud services and tools as part of their infrastructure. Thus, various cloud security procedures enable solid protection from external and internal cyber threats. 

How do cloud service providers ensure your cloud security? 

Cloud security depends on various elements, ranging from the nature of the cloud (public, private or hybrid), the software and the service provider’s reliability to the service settings, access control policies as well as user awareness.  

Beyond that, cloud security is a shared responsibility between you and your cloud service provider. Cloud service providers use the latest comprehensive cyber security tools to protect their customers’ data. It helps to ease your overall cloud journey by taking a large piece of cloud security duties.  

 

Here, we present the top five ways how cloud security solutions reduce business risk:

1. Provides data protection. Ensures data is properly protected, and compliance standards are met without knowing the ins and outs of each regulation. Automated data detection and encryption continuously monitor and protect your data moving through and across workloads;
2. Ensures compliance and data privacy. Cloud provides a comprehensive view of your compliance status and continuously monitors your environment using automated compliance checks. Timely updates help you meet security and compliance standards for your specific industry.
3. Detects threats through continuous monitoring. Use of the latest technologies, including integrated threat intelligence, anomaly detection, and machine learning to detect and stop malicious or unauthorised traffic to prevent it from becoming a business-impacting event;
4. Manage user and device access. Manage user identity, access policies, entitlements, and business governance, including user authentication, authorisation, and single sign-on, instead of dedicating your resources to these tasks. As your organisation grows, the cloud easily scales your identity and access management capabilities.
5. Enforces network and application security. Network and application protection services enable you to enforce fine-grained security policies at network control points across your organisation. Cloud services can also scan for known software vulnerabilities, even unintentionally introduced during development and deployment, that can be exploited to access your network. With cloud-based security, your data is continuously monitored, and issues can be detected early without straining your limited resources.

 

 

Top 7 security activities in the cloud you must activate

Despite what public cloud provider you use, the vendor has limited possibilities to control the entire area of your solution security. We talked about the gradual cloud provider responsibility of infrastructure where customer role is critical for success. Nevertheless, vendor gives you an entire set of tools, techniques and practices that enhance and improve your business security and resiliency.

Here are the most important security activities you can control in a modern way and must maintain in the cloud:  

1. Install current antivirus and identity management on all devices;
2. Establish and configure a firewall to block suspicious traffic;
3. Run regular vulnerability scans on hardware and software, also install patches/updates as vulnerabilities are identified;
4. Perform daily backups of files and databases, operating systems, applications, configurations, virtual machines, hosts and management consoles, cloud-hosted infrastructure, and on-device data;
5. Follow data compliance and data privacy regulations based on our industry and/or geography;
6. Enable quick security alerts’ identification and detection, determining the root cause;
7. Create and maintain an in-depth backup and recovery plan for worst-case scenarios and test it regularly.

 

If performing those activities is complicated with your current infrastructure, the public cloud could be an option to consider for improving your business’s security and resilience.

No one is immune to hackers – they are always looking for vulnerabilities and targets for cyber attacks. Yet, companies can secure data, applications, business resilience and reputation using modern security tools and practices.

Curious to learn more about how companies benefit from the public cloud? You are welcome to get all the needed answers around it by watching our webinar, co-organised with Microsoft.