What is Cloud Security?

 

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services over the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis. It provides services including software, storage and processing power. Cloud security is concerned with providing security to these cloud computing environments against cybersecurity threats. It involves technologies, policies, procedures, controls and services that secure cloud data, cloud-based systems and the infrastructure. This protects customers’ privacy as well. Cloud security can be configured according to the needs of the customers. Administration overheads are also reduced as the configurations are happening in one place.

Cloud Security Implementation is a Joint Responsibility

Implementing cloud security is a joint responsibility between the customer and the solution provider. There are responsibilities of the customer, responsibilities of the solution provider and responsibilities which are different according to the service model (Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service or Software as a Service). Responsibilities of the customer include identity and access management of the users, preventing unauthorized access to cloud accounts, protecting cloud-based data etc. while the solution provider is responsible for protecting the infrastructure, configuration of physical hosts and the physical network etc.

Why is Cloud Security Important?

With the advancement of technology, cyber-attacks evolve day by day and cloud computing is also possessing risks. Therefore, it is essential to safeguard resources, data and processes in cloud computing.

Cloud security comes up with a lot of benefits. Let us look into those.

• Centralized security – Cloud security provides centralized security. In cloud computing, various number of devices and endpoints are involved which makes it difficult to manage. Centralized management improves the quality of traffic analysis and network monitoring which result in a smaller number of software and policy updates. Being centralized enable to implement disaster recovery plans easily.

• Cost reduction – Dedicated hardware is not needed when utilizing cloud security. Therefore, it reduces capital expenditure and administrative overheads. Cloud security can offer protection without any human intervention.

• Administration reduction – Manual security configurations and security updates require a lot of resources. When utilizing cloud security, all the security administrations are taking place in a one place and are managed on the customers’ behalf.

• Reliability – Users can access applications with any device from anywhere they want. Cloud security measures give reliable protection regardless of the devices you use and from where you use those.

• Convenience – Cloud computing is involved with various technologies and processes which makes it hard to handle with traditional security tools. Therefore, implementing cloud security is convenient.

What are the Challenges?

Same as any other technology, there exists challenges in implementing cloud security too.

• Increased attack surface – Public cloud environment is very attractive to cybercriminals as they can access cloud data through poorly secured cloud ingress ports.

• Lack of visibility and tracking – Customers do not have the full control over the infrastructure. Therefore, it has been difficult to identify the cloud assets and quantify them.

• Change in the requirement of assets – In cloud computing, it is possible to scale assets. However, traditional security tools are not capable in providing security in a flexible way to facilitate these dynamic environments.

• Compliance – Cloud computing adds a new dimension to regulatory and internal compliance. Therefore, it may be necessary to adhere to regulatory requirements such as HIPAA and PCI and requirements from internal teams and partners. Due to the poor visibility, the compliance audit process can be difficult to handle.

• Complex environments – It is hard to manage security consistently as tools which are capable of working across public cloud providers, private cloud providers and on-premises deployments are required.

• Granular privilege and key management – Improperly configured keys and loosely configured user roles possess a lot of risks.

• Cloud-native breaches – Data breaches in the cloud usually happen using native functions of the cloud. Attack occurs without using malware and data are accessed through weakly configured interfaces. Misconfiguration is the main reason behind cloud-native breaches.

Even though there are lot of challenges in implementing cloud security, organizations have identified the advantages and are moving towards cloud security. This enables to protect applications from data theft, corruption and many more security threats. With the ever-changing technologies, it is not easy to ensure the security of data and the applications. Therefore, having a robust security solution is the possible action we can take and cloud security appears to be the best solution.

Watch this video to see how cloud security works:

References

• https://www.forcepoint.com/cyber-edu/cloud-security

• https://www.mcafee.com/enterprise/en-us/security-awareness/cloud.html

• https://www.checkpoint.com/cyber-hub/cloud-security/what-is-cloud-security

• https://www.kaspersky.com/resource-center/threats/what-is-cloud-security

• https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-is-cloud-computing-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-cloud