With a record number of cybersecurity attacks taking place, it is necessary to protect your data from a cloud security threat. The transition to the cloud has brought security challenges. But how do you start securing your data in the cloud? This article is here to educate you on some of the best ways to prevent cloud security threats.

1. What is Cloud Security?
2. How Secure is Cloud Computing?
3. Why is Cloud Security Important?
4. 8 Best Ways to prevent cloud security threats 
5. Conclusion

What is Cloud Security?

Cloud security is defined as a set of policies and procedures that mainly aims at protecting cloud-based applications and systems.

Many companies are working remotely, and this has led to an increase in data storage, exposure of sensitive data in the cloud. This can lead to cloud security threats for the company and to its sensitive data. So it is very important to educate the employees about the important cloud security threats and how not to be a victim of the same.

How Secure is Cloud Computing?

Most of the security breaches are caused by humans and rarely caused by poor cloud data security. Some of the main public cloud players like Amazon, Google, Microsoft offer a more secure environment than you cloud hope, yet we might face cloud security threats due to stolen login credentials, accidental deletions, insecure wi-fi connections. So, now it is up to you to decide how secure is cloud computing!

Why is Cloud Security Important?

Most of the companies have decided to migrate their data, applications and other assets to the cloud, now that it is very essential to understand how to protect this sensitive information that could potentially be exposed.

Security professionals are more concerned about cloud security in their organization as data leaks can damage customer’s trust. Some of the surveys say, 33% of security professionals are extremely concerned about public cloud security, 20% are moderately concerned and only 2% said they were not at all concerned about a cloud security threat.

Now let’s take a look at some of the best ways that an employee can focus on preventing cloud security threats within their organizations.

1. Educate your employees:  Most of the organizations are victims of this security threat as their employees are less educated in security-related issues, so make sure the entire workforce undergoes security training. Create a document that offers several threat scenarios so that they will always be prepared and aware of.

2. Data backup plan: Cloud is expanding its horizon day by day, there is a possibility of permanent data loss. So, make sure you have a secure backup of the data. Security professionals must adhere to best practices and distribute data and applications across multiple zones, daily data backup and disaster recovery.

3. Encryption is key: Encryption allows data and text to be in the form of encrypted algorithms and is then placed on a storage cloud. This can ensure the protection of data. Even if the information is stored at the third party provider, one can access the data safely with the help of encryption and decryption keys.

5. Strong Password: Strong passwords must contain at least eight characters, one number, mixed-case letters and non-alphanumeric symbols or come up with distinct, original passwords to deter hackers, yet these passwords can be extracted easily with advanced hardware and software availability. So it is recommended to change the password often.

6. Testing often should be your priority: One should think like a hacker while working on test cases and test scenarios. One of the best ways to prevent cloud security threats is to do penetration testing:

A few things to keep in mind while doing penetration testing:

• This is in-depth testing which looks like a real attack on the system, so make sure you inform your cloud provider before beginning.
• Make a note of our strengths and weaknesses and create test cases so that this helps you to understand what to test and what not to.
• Make sure that penetration testing is done very carefully because internal threats are as likely as external threats.

8 Best Ways to prevent cloud security threats 

1. Data breaches: 

Data breach is an attack in which all the sensitive information is stolen by an unauthorized individual.

Data Breach Impact on company:

• Data breaches can damage a company’s reputation and customers’ trust.
• A data breach can lead to the loss of information to our competitors.
• The data breach may result in monetary loss.
• Data Breach can affect the company’s brand and also market value.

Key Recommendations

• Protecting data is a must.
• Encryption techniques can protect data but can reduce system performance.
• Purchase a robust plan from the cloud provider to secure your system and also helps data breach victims recover.

2. Misconfiguration and inadequate change control

MIC ( Misconfiguration and Inadequate change) occurs when the computing process is set up incorrectly.
Examples are Unsecured data storage elements, unchanged default credentials and configuration settings and many more.

Business Impact from MIC 

A company or an industry can get affected by MIC control because the improper initial set-up, misconfiguration can cause exposure of data stored in cloud repositories.

Key Recommendations

• Traditional controls are not effective in the cloud, so try to enhance them.
• Companies should embrace automation that can help in continuous scan for misconfigured resources and find a suitable solution.

3. Lack of cloud security architecture and strategy

When companies migrate IT infrastructure to the public cloud, implementing the proper security and strategy is one of the important challenges.

Business Impact from lack of cloud security 

Proper security architecture and strategy is required for securely moving, deploying in the cloud without which, cloud security threat can lead to financial loss, reputational damage, legal repercussions, and fines.

Key Recommendations

• The security architecture must align with your business goals and ensure that the threat model is kept up to date.
• Develop a security architecture framework.

4. Account hijack

Attackers gain access to accounts that are highly sensitive.

Business Impact from account hijacking

• As account hijacking can compromise your account, business logic, applications.
• This can trigger data leaks that lead to reputational damage, brand value legal liability exposure, and sensitive personal and business information.

Key  Recommendations

• Account hijacking is a threat that must be taken seriously as fallout from the account hijack can be severe

5. Insider threats

Insider is none other than your own employees, they don’t have to break through firewalls, VPNs and other security defences to access the sensitive data.

Business Impact from insider threats

• Insider threats can result in the loss of intellectual property.
• Insider attacks can impact company productivity.
• Dealing with insider security incidents requires containment, escalation, monitoring, and surveillance, all of which can add to a company’s workload and security budget.

Key Recommendations

• Minimize insider negligence.
• Provide training to your employees about security protocols to understand how unethical it is to breach their own companies’ data and also provide training for your employees to inform them how to handle security risks, such as phishing.
• Require strong passwords and frequent password updates.
• Access to all computer servers at any privilege level.

6. Control plane

A weak control plane makes a person have less control over the data, infrastructure’s logic, security, and verification.

Business Impact from a weak control plane

• A weak control plane could result in data loss, either by theft or corruption. Regulatory punishment for data loss may be incurred as well.
• With a weak control plane, users may also be unable to protect their cloud-based business data and applications.

Key Recommendations

• Adequate security controls are necessary so that cloud customers can fulfil their legal obligations.

7. Meta-structure failures

Potential failures exist at multiple levels in the meta-structure model. Poor API  implementation offers attackers an opportunity to breach your privacy.

Business Impact from meta-structure failures

Meta-structure failures can impact your business on a large scale.

Key Recommendations

• Cloud providers must offer visibility and transparency for customers.
• Cloud customers should implement appropriate features and conduct penetration testing.

8. Limited cloud usage

Limited cloud usage occurs when an organization does not analyze cloud services properly.

Business Impact from limited cloud usage

• Lack of governance: When a company or an employee is not familiar with the process, access, governance and control lead to data security threats.
• Lack of awareness: As we discussed in our article, educating employees has to be your priority because lack of awareness can damage your organization’s brand and reputation.
• Lack of security: When a security professional sets up a cloud service incorrectly, then it may compromise your organization’s data, services, and finally it may lead to monetary loss.

Key Recommendations

• The development of a complete cloud visibility effort from the top down is necessary to protect companies privacy.
• Mandate company-wide training on cloud usage policies and enforcement is a must.
• Non-approved cloud services should be reviewed by the cloud security architect.
• Solutions like cloud access security brokers (CASB) or software-defined gateway (SDG) can help you analyze outbound activities.
• Web application firewall (WAF) helps you to analyze all inbound connections for suspicious trends, malware, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS).
• Implement a zero-trust model.

Before we go

The adoption of cloud technology is a boon as this technology has given much-needed scalability and flexibility to remain competitive in the business environment. At the same time, there is a whole new set of security risks and creates numerous cloud security issues.

The best way to protect your company from monetary losses is to follow the standards of cloud security.