Cloud Security: Best Practices to Mitigate Risks

Aaron Dsouza

March 26, 2024

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Cloud Security: Best Practices to Mitigate Risks

Introduction

In today’s digital architecture, the cloud has made the development and deployment of applications easy and fast, resulting in organizations rapidly moving from a traditional architecture to a cloud-based architecture. This shift from traditional to cloud-based architecture provides organizations with a myriad of advantages. These advantages necessitate addressing new and complex security issues to build a safe application and secure the important data you store in the cloud. This article will focus on some of the best practices in cloud security that help mitigate these risks.

Best Practices

Let’s explore some best practices to ensure a secure cloud environment:

Implement Multifactor Authentication (MFA): Multifactor authentication is an authentication process that requires the user to provide two or more factors to prove their identity. Applying multifactor authentication is one of the simplest and easiest ways to secure your cloud. Even if your password has been compromised, you can prevent the threat actor from accessing your account by ensuring they do not have access to your secondary factors used for authentication. These factors can be of three types:
- Something that you have: like a mobile phone or a secure USB key.
- Something that you know: like a PIN or a password.
- Something that you are: Like fingerprint, retinal, or face recognition.
Use Encryption: Effective data security demands encrypting data both at rest and in transit. Encryption adds a level of security and ensures compliance with legal and other regulatory requirements. It also ensures that the data remains intelligible to threat actors without the correct encryption key.
Use Principle of Least Privilege: The Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) is a fundamental concept within the zero trust model, premised on the notion that any user or device may present a threat. Consequently, according to PoLP, organizations are tasked with granting users and entities only the minimal permissions necessary for their respective roles. By adhering to PoLP, organizations can effectively curtail access to sensitive cloud-stored data exclusively to authorized individuals. Consequently, this proactive approach significantly aids in mitigating the risk of security breaches.
Use Monitoring: Use monitoring tools to detect suspicious activities and traffic early. Many cloud providers provide monitoring solutions, like Amazon GuardDuty in AWS and Microsoft Sentinel in Azure.
Know your responsibilities: Cloud service providers often follow a shared responsibility model, which splits up the security responsibility between customers and the cloud service providers. These responsibilities usually vary based on the type of service model that the customer uses.
Apply Strong Password: Implement strong password policies that prevent the user from using weak and commonly known passwords, and set strict guidelines for password creation, such as the inclusion of alphanumeric characters.
Use Access Control Policies: Access Control Policies specify the access to a resource, i.e., they specify who can access the resource, what level of access they have, as well as factors like from where they can access the resources, what action they can perform, and so on.
Train your employees: Creating awareness among your employees about the various cloud security threats, coupled with training on how to face them, can significantly mitigate security breaches.
Segment your network: Network segmentation provides a powerful security strategy. It involves dividing your network into smaller sub-networks, which act as separate security zones with their policies. By segmenting your cloud networks, you can effectively minimize the damage that may occur in the event of a breach. We can achieve this by localizing the damage to one particular segment, thereby containing potential security threats.
Use Secure APIs and Protocols: Use secure protocols and APIs while transferring data between applications, moving data within the cloud, or moving data from on-premise to the cloud.

Conclusion

Securing the cloud is an ongoing and ever-changing endeavor. To build a secure and robust cloud infrastructure, organizations must actively implement both robust security policies and various security tools. This combined approach safeguards data and applications residing in the cloud. By adhering to the best practices outlined above, organizations can take significant strides towards fortifying their cloud defenses. Leveraging various cloud security tools, like key management and encryption services, will help you reach this goal faster. Cloud security should not be relegated to an afterthought; rather, it should be prioritized as one of the initial steps when transitioning from a traditional architecture to a cloud-based infrastructure.

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