What is Cloud Security?

Understanding cloud security begins with the basics. So, how exactly does cloud security work? Read on for the details, including common challenges, best practices, and the 7 pillars of cloud security.

Cloud Security Definition

Before we dive deeper, let's first define cloud security and explain what it is. Cloud security (sometimes also called cloud data security or cloud computing security) refers to the protection of information, applications, data, platforms, and infrastructure that operate or exist within the cloud. It consists of a variety of tools, policies, architectures, strategies, controls, and technologies designed to reduce the likelihood of theft, inappropriate access, deletion, exposure, or leakage. Cloud security applies to all types of cloud computing infrastructures, including public clouds, private clouds, and hybrid clouds.

Cloud security is a type of cybersecurity.

The Importance of Cloud Security

Many companies are using the cloud to conduct business operations—a practice often called cloud computing. With so many business activities now being conducted in the cloud and with cyber threats on the rise, cloud security has become critically important.

Cloud security solutions offer protection from different types of threats, such as:

• Malicious activity caused by cybercriminals and nation states, including ransomware, malware, phishing; denial of service (DoS) attacks; advanced persistent threats; cryptojacking; brute force hacking; man-in-the-middle attacks; zero-day attacks; and data breaches.
• Insider threats caused by rogue or disgruntled staff members; human error; staff negligence; and infiltration by external threat actors who have obtained legitimate credentials without authorization.
• Vulnerabilities such as flaws or weaknesses in systems, applications, procedures, and internal controls that can accidentally or intentionally trigger a security breach or violation.
• Modern threats targeting new technologies. Cloud security frameworks and third-party cloud security tools can help keep up with the evolving landscape of new technologies that when implemented into an ecosystem can potentially introduce new threats.

How Does it Benefit Your Organization?

Cloud security offers organizations scalable protection, enhancing data safety and compliance with regulations. It reduces the complexity of security management, provides advanced threat detection capabilities, and offers cost-effective solutions by eliminating the need for extensive on-premise security infrastructure.

Cost Efficiency

Cloud security models greatly reduce an organization's need for expensive on-site hardware and lessen the reliance on internal IT staff for security management. Additionally, cloud security gives organizations a high amount of flexibility; cloud security requires that you only pay for features and services you require. This scalability and tailored approach to security helps businesses streamline their operations and benefit from cost-effective protection.

Operational and Administrative Savings

A shift from on-premise security systems to cloud-based ones can help organizations significantly reduce their overhead. Cloud-based solutions like those we offer at GuidePoint Security help decrease the time and number of resources spent on maintaining and updating security infrastructure. This shift requires that you dedicate less time to administrative tasks like system upgrades and patch management, cutting down on direct costs and helping you reallocate your internal resources more efficiently. 

Continuous Threat Monitoring

Our cloud security solutions offer 24/7 monitoring of threats and leverage the deep experience and expertise of our specialized teams of experts. Additionally, we use advanced cloud security technology that helps vigilantly oversee the cyber landscape. Our experts continuously track and counteract evolving threats to ensure you're protected against sophisticated and constantly evolving cyber threats. 

Enhanced Reliability and Availability

Cloud security infrastructure is designed for robustness and continuous service; infrastructures are resilient to outages and ensure that data and applications have as much uptime as possible. Redundant systems, advanced disaster recovery protocols, and regular, comprehensive backups help us achieve this resilience and guarantee that you experience minimal service interruption, even in the face of technical failures or cyber threats. 

Centralized Security

Cloud security centralizes protection across your organization's devices and locations, offering you a uniform security policy and streamlined management. By consolidating security in the cloud, organizations can benefit from an aggregated view of threats and activities, regardless of where their devices are or where their employees are working. This centralized approach simplifies the enforcement of consistent security policies and procedures across the entire organization. 

Compliance and Data Privacy

Cloud security solutions help organizations comply with regulations and standards, and they typically include built-in tools and features that help maintain data privacy and manage compliance requirements. Solutions like those we provide at GuidePoint offer encryption services, access controls, and audit trails, which are critical for adhering to standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS. 

Scalability Made Easy

Cloud security offers effortless scalability to match an organization's growth. As you expand your operations, you can count on cloud security to seamlessly adapt without ever requiring significant changes or installations. This scalability is inherent in cloud services, allowing for increased or decreased security resources and capabilities in line with organizational needs.

Enhanced DDoS Protection

We use mechanisms to detect and mitigate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, ensuring your services remain continuously available. Our experts employ sophisticated monitoring tools to identify and respond to attack patterns in real-time. By utilizing techniques such as traffic analysis, rate limiting, and filtering, they can help you effectively neutralize DDoS threats and minimize their impact.

Solutions for Cloud Security

A comprehensive cloud security approach can include a range of technologies, architectures, and strategies that offer businesses protection from cybercrime, insider threats, and vulnerabilities.

Technologies for Cloud Security

• Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB): A cloud access security broker sits between cloud service providers and cloud users to monitor activity and enforce security policies. A CASB combines multiple types of security policy enforcement, such as authentication, authorization, single sign-on, credential mapping, device profiling, encryption tokenization, and logging.
  
• Cloud Encryption: Cloud encryption involves using algorithms to change data and information stored in the cloud to make it indecipherable to anyone not possessing access to the encryption keys. Encryption protects information from being accessed and read, even if it is intercepted during a transfer from a device to the cloud or between different cloud systems. Cloud Service Providers and cloud vendors offer unique ways to provide encryption in an environment with key management tools.
  
• Cloud Firewalls: A firewall is a type of security solution that blocks or filters out malicious traffic. Cloud firewalls form virtual barriers between corporate assets that exist in the cloud and untrusted, external, internet-connected networks and traffic. Cloud firewalls are also sometimes called a firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS).
  
• Cloud Security Posture Management: CSPM security solutions continuously monitor the dynamic and ever-changing cloud environments and identify gaps between security policy and security posture. CSPM solutions comply with specific frameworks (e.g. SOC2, CIS v1.1, HIPAA) and can be used to consolidate misconfigurations, safeguard the flow of data between internal IT architecture and the cloud, and broaden security policies to extend beyond in-house infrastructure.
  
• Container Security: Container security involves the use of security tools and policies to protect and ensure the integrity of ‘containers’—the standard unit of software that holds code and software dependencies. Container security protects the container, its application, and its performance, as well as the container’s infrastructure, software supply chain, and system tools and libraries. Container security is scalable through the configuration and design of aspects of security applications.
  
• Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CI/CD): CI/CD tools and frameworks introduce automation and monitoring through the application lifecycle to identify and protect from vulnerabilities, bugs, and flaws.
  
• Identity and access management (IAM or IdAM): Identity and access management enables companies to administer user computing privileges from an authentication, control, and tracking perspective. The ‘identity’ component of IAM is often characterized by authentication factors related to specific information about the user. The three most common authentication factors are: something the user knows (username and password); something the user has (a security token/fob, a common access card (CAC), or an application on a smartphone); and something the user has (a thumbprint or facial recognition). Common terms for authentication solutions are two-factor authentication (2FA) and multi-factor authentication (MFA). The ‘access’ component of IAM defines the type of information, systems, or applications a user can see and what actions they may perform once they’re logged in.
  
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Infrastructure as code is a descriptive coding language that automates the management and provisioning of IT infrastructure, including networks, data centers, virtual machines, load balancers, and connection topology. IaC is critical in DevOps because it enables rapid creation and versioning of infrastructure using consistent source code.
  
• Policy as Code (PaC): Just like IaC, Policy as Code takes automation of infrastructure a step further by validating IaC against policies. Environments that pass the policy continue to build, while ones that fail don’t. This is a great way to prevent non-compliant environments from even making it into an ecosystem.
  
• Secure Web Gateways (SWG): SWG solutions apply web filtering to enforce internet access policies. They also protect from user-initiated downloads of unwanted software and malware. SWG solutions include URL filtering, HTTPS/SSL inspection, data loss prevention, remote browser isolation capabilities, and application control

Architectures for Cloud Security

• Zero Trust Architectures (ZTA): Zero trust (ZT) is both a model and set of security standards focused on providing security controls around digital assets that are separate from and do not solely depend on traditional network controls or perimeters. A Zero Trust architecture applies zero trust concepts and incorporates the relationship between network components, workflow planning, and access policies. This type of architecture advocates granting access to a user or device based on the level of confidence that exists with the device identity and device health, in combination with user authentication. Zero trust architectures are also sometimes called zero trust networks or zero trust security models.
• Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Architecture: SASE is an emerging network security architecture that combines virtual private networks (VPN) and wide area networks (WAN) with cloud and network security services, such as next-generation firewalls (NGFW), secure web gateways (SWG), zero-trust network access (ZTNA), and cloud access security brokers (CASB).

Strategies for Cloud Security

There are a variety of strategies and cloud security strategy services that can be applied to maximize cloud security effectiveness. These include regular security training for employees, staying aware of the threat landscape, establishing and enforcing cloud security policies, understanding corporate and stakeholder priorities, and aligning stakeholders with the cloud security posture.

Top Cloud Security Challenges

Organizations are facing a relentless onslaught of threats and challenges that affect their ability to effectively secure activity, cloud applications, data, and infrastructure in the cloud. Threats and challenges are numerous and include data breaches and data loss, misconfigurations, advanced persistent threats (APTs), evolving and sophisticated malware and ransomware, compromised Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the lack of appropriate and up-to-date security strategies, inadequate identity and access management policies and solutions, and insider threats.

7 Pillars of Cloud Security

Cloud security solutions are critical to securing an organization’s mission-critical activities and information. To ensure the most effective response to today’s threats and challenges, organizations need to view cloud security holistically, recognizing that it takes more than just the latest tools and technologies to address vulnerabilities and prevent breaches and data loss. A comprehensive cloud security strategy includes the following:

• The right combination of cloud security solutions: The goals and priorities of any given organization can differ greatly.  Cloud security services need to serve the needs of your organization, including goals and risks. Cloud security solutions should not be limited to just tools and technologies, but also include established cloud security frameworks and emerging architectures. Cloud security also needs to be compatible with other security deployed across your network.
• Robust identity and access management technology and policies: IAM is as much about the technology as it is about the policies and how they’re applied. Make sure your organization has clear and well-developed policies around IAM and key access controls such as MFA, roles-based access, and zero trust policies.
• Understand a shared responsibility model: Cloud providers are typically responsible for cloud infrastructure security  while the customer is responsible for protecting the data that is stored in the cloud. In any cloud provider relationship, it is important to clearly define the lines of responsibility to reduce risk.
• Proper security control configurations and processes: The configurations and policies put into place to support cloud security are as important as cloud security tools and technologies.
• Robust data encryption: Encryption is critical to ensure data and information to be stored in the cloud are protected—both while in the cloud and while in transit to the cloud. Not only should organizations have a robust data encryption solution, but they should also ensure they have full control over encryption keys.
• Effective operations management: Establish a collaborative culture not only within security and IT, but also with other relevant departments and groups, such as operations and corporate executives to promote security operations goals and objectives and understand the needs and requirements of external stakeholders, such as customers, regulators, and third-party vendors/suppliers.
• Security and compliance application and monitoring: Every industry has regulatory compliance concerns that are unique and applicable only to them. Cloud security solutions need to align and be configured to support compliance concerns. Security and IT teams also need to be prepared to collect and audit data and monitor activity to watch for and flag non-compliant activity.

Cloud Security Best Practices

Cloud computing is changing the way we do business. But it also offers cybercriminals an opportunity to wreak havoc on unprotected cloud-based data and systems. Organizations can maximize their cloud security by applying several key best practice approaches:

• Work with the right cloud security provider: Cloud security vendors can differ in both offerings and capabilities. Evaluate and compare the offerings, the products, and the levels of compliance to make sure they’re the right ones for your organization. In addition, make sure that the cloud security provider is prepared to understand the needs and risks of your organization and industry and provide cloud security solutions accordingly.
• Understand shared responsibility: Every person involved in the cloud security operations process—from the cloud provider to the security operations and IT team—needs to know their role and take responsibility for their part in ensuring organizational systems and data remain secure at all times.
• Train. Train. Train: People are often the weakest link in the security chain, which makes regular and comprehensive security training critical. IT and security teams should also monitor and track cyber violations to understand where weaknesses might exist in the training.
• Deploy identity and access management: Unauthorized access and account hijacking are two of the most common forms of breaches. This makes an IAM solution important to your comprehensive cloud security approach.
• Know what data is being stored in the cloud and where it is being stored: Data stored in the cloud can contain some highly sensitive information related to customers, organizational finances, and corporate research and development. Make sure your data is stored in an appropriate location—for example, customer credit card numbers or highly sensitive R&D information shouldn’t be stored in a public cloud.
• Know who is accessing your data and systems: Sometimes it isn’t just your employees who have access to your cloud systems—third-party vendors may also require access. Know who is accessing your data and systems and why. If third-party suppliers and vendors need access, make sure they can only access the systems and data required and have robust security technologies, procedures, and policies in place to help prevent a third-party breach of your systems.
• Perform regular audits and penetration testing: Even if you have cloud security in place, you still need to ensure your security is operational and functioning with maximum effectiveness. Perform audits and penetration testing regularly and keep tabs on access logs.
• Secure endpoints: With remote work becoming increasingly commonplace, endpoints may be scattered around the country or even around the globe. Continually update and upgrade security related to endpoints, including firewalls, antimalware, and intrusion detection.
• Establish and enforce cloud security policies: Your cloud security policies should align clearly with your compliance and regulatory requirements. Focus your cloud security policies on areas such as scope, compliance, accountability, deployment, IAM, data/systems confidentiality and sensitivity, acceptable use, and breaches

FAQs

Q: How do I know if my organization needs cloud security?

A: If your company and staff are accessing and using the cloud (and most organizations today use some form of cloud computing), then you need to secure it.

Q: How does cloud security differ from “traditional” on-premise security?

A: Tradition on-premise security involves buying, installing, maintaining, and upgrading your on-site corporate devices with security hardware and software. Cloud security involves protecting data, information, systems, applications, and infrastructure within the cloud. If your company and staff are using cloud computing as part of your operations, then you need cloud security.

Q: What is the difference between cloud security and network security?

A: Cloud security involves the protection of information, applications, data, platforms, and infrastructure that operate or exist within the cloud. Network security is a form of cloud security and includes the policies and practices your organization puts in place to monitor and control access and prevent unauthorized access.

Q: Aren’t my cloud apps and data already secure?

A: Different cloud service providers provide different levels of security and maintain different shared responsibility standards. Often the customer is still responsible for protecting their own data and information. This means you need to apply a comprehensive cloud security approach that meets the needs of your organization and industry and addresses the dangers associated with malicious or unauthorized software and applications, unauthorized access, and data exfiltration.