Nowadays, more and more companies are leaving their on-premise infrastructures and migrating to the cloud for its convenience and flexibility, among other reasons. But where companies go, cybercriminals inevitably follow. For this reason, the threat of cloud security breaches has become increasingly pertinent in our modern digital age.
For instance, in December 2017, an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) breach exposed the private data of around 123 million American households. What ultimately set the groundwork for the breach to occur? The AWS S3 was misconfigured.
This disastrous breach is one of the many negative consequences that can result from companies hastily jumping onto the cloud bandwagon.
This isn’t to dissuade you from moving to the cloud—there are undeniable benefits—but such a transition should be done properly and with a clear cloud security strategy for fending off cyberattacks.
What is cloud security? What challenges do companies like yours face when setting it up? And what other necessary considerations must be made to best defend your business systems and the data of your loyal customers? These are some of the questions we’ll be exploring today.
What is cloud security?
Cloud security refers to the security of your cloud infrastructure and its resources, the data within your systems, and the accessibility of those systems.
Another way to think about it is that cloud security protects your house and valuables while also keeping out unauthorized and unwanted guests.
To support your business’s cloud security, you should implement and maintain certain policies, technologies, and programs that help protect your systems and infrastructure. This is pivotal not only for the continuity of your business but also for the security of customers who rely on you.
Adhering to good cloud security practices will also support your ability to maintain regulatory compliance. Due to the complexity of the subject, cloud security tends not to be something businesses handle purely in-house.
The providers of any security solutions you use should offer assistance with onboarding and upkeep to help you succeed with their product. Otherwise, your IT team or MSP will be able to take the lead on these issues.
Why does Cloud Security Matter?
As mentioned before, wherever there are businesses and customers, there will also be criminals, and unfortunately, cybercriminals are becoming incredibly sophisticated in their approaches to breaching your security.
As the number of businesses that move to the cloud continues to increase, the amount of proprietary information attached to those businesses becomes at risk of being compromised by tech-savvy criminals.
Additionally, as the amount of consumer data that exists in the cloud grows, so too will corresponding compliance issues and regulations.
At this point in time, the majority of organizations are already using some form of cloud computing, whether that involves Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or G-suite. Those companies that haven’t yet moved even partly to the cloud will likely be doing so soon.
All of this is to say that cloud adoption has become mainstream for businesses, so naturally, cloud security is becoming equally important.
Without cloud security, you and your customers have no guarantee that your data and systems won’t be compromised by unwanted entities in your system—and lacking the right internal protocols, the threats outside your company may be as serious as the potential threats within.
It isn’t as if the data security game has dramatically changed; businesses like yours have always needed to prioritize the safety and integrity of important data, such as secret documents, financial records, health records, etc. What’s shifted is the landscape in which the game takes place.
With all of this in mind, you might be wondering why anyone would risk moving to the cloud at all without solid cloud security in place.
One reason this happens is that ignoring cloud security leads to lower upfront and reduced operational costs. It’s simply a form of short-term thinking that the company has to pay for when a disruptive event inevitably interferes with business continuity and can cause many problems from financial, to legal and regulatory.
Once your business is set up with a solid cloud security solution, you might be tempted to just kick back and let it do its continuous work.
This is inadvisable as even the best security systems should be monitored to make sure they’re functioning properly. In fact, doing these types of checks should be part of the processes that build up your solid security stack.
We recommend that you regularly make an assessment of your data and systems every 6 months to a year. These assessments can take a serious amount of time and effort, especially for larger companies dealing with unwieldy amounts of data.
Luckily, Commprise can relieve you of that burden with our Managed Security Services. We deliver the technology, insight and oversight your organizations’ IT requires for top-notch security, and we tailor our strategy and solutions to your unique needs.