Cloud computing refers to the delivery of on-demand IT resources over the internet with a pay-as-you-go fee structure. It provides easy access to services, applications, databases, and storage resources. With the cloud, enterprises can scale with flexibility while target databreach savings implementation and maintenance costs.
For small to mid-sized enterprises, leveraging the benefits of a public cloud is an ideal option. They can access high-performance applications without the need for significant infrastructure investment as with on-premise solutions. The public cloud environment brings with it the challenge of enterprise cloud security.
Protecting your enterprise data and system assets becomes a task when multiple users can access the infrastructure that supports your business. This article aims to outline steps that can help strengthen cloud security and protect your enterprise against risks and threats.
Why Is Cloud Security Important?
Cloud security is a set of policies and programs to protect sensitive data from theft, deletion, and misuse. Data security is of utmost importance for enterprises to work. With remote availability, phishing and social engineering attacks are common on the cloud system. Using a compromised account, a malicious user can gain access to your system remotely.
A traditional security approach is strengthening the parameter security and assuming the environment inside the perimeter is safe from threats. Shift your focus from perimeter security to identity and data security.
Steps for Implementing Enterprise Cloud Security Systems
Implement the Principle of Least Privilege
The principle of least privilege states that users and services should be assigned only those roles that are necessary to complete their task. There is no need for multiple employees in your team to have admin rights to the system. High-privilege accounts can fall prey to hackers, external threats, or internal misuse.
You need to identify the risks in your system like horizontal and vertical privilege escalation, toxic combinations, and dormant identities and implement the least privilege to tackle such risks. With the least privilege, you reduce the surface area of attack.
For example, the target databreach was a result of stolen credentials. The least privilege principle ensures even when an account is compromised, you can contain the damage with the account’s limited privilege portfolio.
Assess Risk by Modeling Trust Relationships
It would be best if you had a clear picture of what is going on within your system. There are multiple instances, containers, serverless functions, different teams, and user accounts. All of these entities have their own roles and privileges assigned.
By modeling trust relationships, you know what privilege can access what functionality in your system. It would help if you implemented data classification according to data sensitivity to limit access to them.
There are enterprise cloud security tools available in the marketplace today that can help with the storage and verification of rights. They look for different sources of unclassified data and determine their classification for controlled access.
Segregation of Roles and Responsibilities
Segregation of duties is a concept wherein a single person cannot be responsible for two or more business processes. This internal control aims to manage human error and fraud.
For example, a single person cannot be responsible for creating a new supplier in the system and also clearing supplier invoices. Even if these roles are not assigned to a single user account, the user may still gain the privilege resulting from conflict with other roles.
For effective implementation of segregation of duties, your governance tool must be capable of spanning across platforms such as cloud providers, third-party data stores, and container platforms. Study the movement of data and identify relationships between different entities.
System Governance with Automation
Once all controls and security checks are in place, you need to continuously monitor the system for any suspicious behavior that deviates from the trust relationship model. A governance automation tool studies the system for the baseline behavior, creates and manages alerts, and notifies concerned teams in case of any deviations.
You could also proactively have prevention and remediation processes in place to manage alerts and safeguard your cloud environment. Having a cohesive view of the system lets you know how different teams interact, who is accessing what, and identify areas that could be further strengthened.
An automated governance system will help monitor the system 24*7. Ensure effective implementation of least privilege. Classify data and proactively study interactions between different teams. Make employees a part of the solution. Provide them with training, educate them on social engineering attacks, and identify and deal with them.
Regardless of the industry, cloud computing is the future. With enterprise cloud security measures, you can safeguard your system and lay the foundation for growth and innovation.
