Studies show that over 90% of organizations store at least some of their digital assets in the cloud. Protecting that data goes far beyond the cloud security measures cloud providers currently offer. Cloud data security relies on a dynamic process that continuously adapts to evolving threats, protecting data and ensuring compliance with strict regulatory standards on how data must be stored, processed, and shared.
Challenges of Securing Data in Modern Cloud Platforms
Ensuring data security compliance has become highly complex, especially as the number of users in cloud environments increases. This complexity is amplified when those users are granted countless access permissions that give them entry to cloud infrastructures and apps overloaded with sensitive data.
Add to that the growing problem of internal teams without proper training or a sense of responsibility overlooking potential data privacy risks, and it’s easy to see how an organization’s data is highly vulnerable and at risk of non-compliance. Adopting a layered security approach to cloud-based data security allows you to effectively safeguard your company’s sensitive data and stay ahead of potential threats.
The Importance of Data Security in Cloud Platforms
Data security protects sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI). It’s challenging to protect theses data sets in modern cloud platforms, particularly with diverse and distributed data stacks.
When your company transitions to the cloud, it’s essential to have a strategy for evaluating its threat landscape. Ransomware, malware, and phishing are some of the most common and persistent threats that, unfortunately, are also becoming more sophisticated. Current cloud security strategies aren’t necessarily equipped to manage these advanced threats.
Here are just a few of the risks data faces in a typical cloud setup:
1. Data overlap in shared cloud environments. When multiple users share cloud resources, the potential for data overlap and contamination increases. A breach or malfunction can result in unintended data exposure, corruption, or loss.
2. Security challenges in dynamic and distributed environments. The scalable and intricate nature of today’s data environments, including hybrid and multi-cloud setups, complicates traditional data security measures. With data distributed across varied architectures and covered by sometimes conflicting security protocols, new, adaptive security strategies are necessary to address the evolving challenges.
3. Challenges in maintaining data security oversight. Modern networks are extensive in scope, with numerous endpoints and complex data flows that complicate the management of data visibility and security. In environments where security responsibilities are shared between cloud providers and users, a lack of consistent security practices and the fluid nature of resource management can create significant vulnerabilities and oversight challenges.
Implementing advanced cloud data security to safeguard sensitive information offers many benefits for businesses.
- Enhanced protection guards against data breaches, reducing potential financial losses and reputational damage.
- Regulatory compliance features ensure adherence to global data protection regulations, avoiding costly penalties and legal complications.
- Customer trust is enhanced by demonstrating a commitment to data integrity and confidentiality.
- A competitive advantage in markets where robust data security is a key factor.
- Reliable disaster recovery ensures business continuity in the face of security incidents or technical failures.
To ensure cloud data security, organizations must update governance, assess data sensitivity, and determine workload suitability for cloud environments.
Cloud Control: Cloud Data Security Best Practices
The volume of data stored in the cloud will only continue to grow. That makes it vital for organizations to implement practices and procedures to protect their data from unauthorized access, use, or damage.
Implementing these ten cloud security best practices can help you strengthen your security posture and mitigate risks.
1. Implement Strong Access Controls
Access controls have become critically important to data security in cloud environments. For instance, as the cloud often provides services to a greater number of users, the potential attack surfaces increase. To safeguard data, organizations should implement physical and logical access controls that, together with multi factor authentication, restrict user access to sensitive data.
Developing and implementing effective data access policies and controls ensures that only authorized individuals can interact with digital assets, reducing breach risks and unauthorized actions. This can be challenging, particularly in organizations where data must be available to everyone. Advanced access controls ensure only users with explicit permissions can access specific data.
Velotix is the only AI-powered data security platform that uses policy-based access control (PBAC) to grant access based on roles, policies, and attributes to those who require it to perform their tasks. And because PBAC allows you to quickly adjust to requirements changes, assets remain secure and are always up-to-date and accounted for.
2. Train Employees to Identify Social Engineering Attempts.
Nearly three out of four cyberattacks involve the human element, including errors, misuse, and social engineering attacks that target users with administrator accounts for elevated access. Educating staff on how to anticipate and identify these and other types of threats, including phishing, is a cost-effective yet highly rewarding approach to improving data security and regulatory compliance.
3. Perform Regular System Updates
This can seem like obvious cloud security advice, but you might be surprised at how many organizations are less than diligent about maintaining a secure cloud environment. A lack of resources and expertise can result in system updates, patches, vulnerability assessments, and penetration testing being put off, with many businesses hoping existing tools will offer adequate damage control in the case of data loss or a breach.
4. Mitigate Third-Party Risks
Modern businesses use various multi-cloud and hybrid environments to support their data apps and storage. While most cloud platforms offer built-in security, organizations must remain diligent by adopting solutions and practices that help them gain visibility into third-party risks while achieving ongoing compliance. Third-party providers should be vetted to confirm they meet security standards and align with your organization’s requirements, ensuring the cloud doesn’t become a point of entry to valuable sensitive data.
5. Protect Your Network
Networks can be overlooked as a potential risk, but improperly maintained, they are a wide-open point of attack for cloud-based systems. VPCs, firewalls, and other network security tools guard against unauthorized access. An advanced cloud-based data security platform uses data, network, and application level security controls to ensure data integrity and privacy.
6. Encrypt Data
In cloud environments, data often needs to be shared with multiple users, including partners, customers, and other stakeholders. Data encryption protects sensitive information like customer data, financial records, and intellectual property, ensuring it remains secure in transit and while stored in the cloud environment. It allows companies to share information quickly and safely while still maintaining control over who can access it. It also makes it more difficult for bad actors to exploit it, as even if they gained access to encrypted data, they would not have the methods to decrypt it.
7. Monitor Your Environment for Risks and Attacks in Real Time
There was a time when static solutions like cloud security posture management were sufficient for maintaining a baseline security posture and ensuring basic compliance. But as attacks grow increasingly complex and sophisticated, dynamic solutions are needed to adapt to these evolving threats and continuously secure cloud configurations and identifies.
Advanced data security solutions provide real-time monitoring and automated response capabilities, which are essential in an age when threats change rapidly and attack vectors are constantly evolving. They use machine learning and AI to predict and prevent potential breaches before they occur and adjust security measures dynamically to address new and emerging vulnerabilities.
8. Develop and Implement an Incident Response Plan
An incident response plan outlines procedures for detecting, responding to, and recovering from security incidents to minimize damage and mitigate exposure of sensitive data. Key steps include:
- Establishing a dedicated incident response team.
- Defining clear roles and responsibilities.
- Maintaining communication protocols.
It’s also critical to integrate automated security tools that provide real-time alerts and facilitate swift action. Regularly updating and testing the plan ensures readiness and effectiveness against evolving cyber threats, and post-incident analysis identifies security gaps and helps in refining future incident response strategies.
9. Ensure Full Visibility Into Infrastructure and Data
You can’t protect what you can’t see. Full visibility into your organization’s infrastructure and data has always been a priority, yet it is increasingly important in digital transformations. It’s also extremely challenging, as you can’t be confident of containing an incident if you can’t view all systems and data. Advanced monitoring tools track real-time access and activities across all cloud resources. Integrating them with existing security systems to detect anomalies and maintain clear oversight of data flow and user actions allows you to proactively manage vulnerabilities and enhance your overall security posture.
10. Understand Your Data Security Responsibilities
Many organizations mistakenly believe the cloud reduces their responsibility and risks, assuming the cloud provider will manage security configurations, availability, backups, and resiliency. However, it’s vital for organizations using the cloud to understand what data is being stored, the reasoning behind it, and their security responsibilities. Fortunately, cloud providers like Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud provide documentation and security best practices that, once implemented, significantly enhance security posture by aligning it with industry standards and regulatory requirements.
Velotix: The Missing Piece to Your Cloud Data Security Strategy
Implementing the most advanced access controls, following strict encryption protocols, and ensuring full visibility into your organization’s infrastructure enables your business to strengthen its cloud-based security solutions.
Velotix’s AI-powered access control data security platform provides a leading-edge approach to protecting sensitive information. An innovative model that revolutionizes conventional methods, it integrates policy-based access control that takes your cloud security strategy to new heights, offering robust defense mechanisms that seamlessly integrate with your existing tools and policies.
Contact us today to learn more or book a demo.
