Many organizations have been leveraging cloud-based technologies for agility, flexibility, and scalability advantages. Given this context, cloud security is indispensable for all organizations. By implementing cloud security correctly, organizations can ensure business continuity and unlock many opportunities that the cloud environment offers.
Let us understand what cloud security is and the benefits of cloud security.
What is Cloud Security?
Definition
Cloud security is a set of policies, strategies, controls, procedures, and practices designed to safeguard the data, resources, and applications hosted on the cloud. It provides multiple levels of protection within the network infrastructure against data breaches, unauthorized access, DDoS attacks, and so on.
What Does It Entail?
Cloud security is an umbrella term that includes:
- Access control
- Security policy and strategies
- Redundancy
- Datacenter security
- Cloud application security
- Threat prevention, detection, and mitigation
- User security
- Network security
- Regulatory compliance
- Content security and so on.
A well-designed and business-specific security strategy will help minimize the risks, if not mitigate/ avert all threats.
Important Security Tools and Components
- Cloud WAF is situated on the network perimeter to monitor incoming traffic/ requests before they can reach the server/ business resources. Cloud-based WAF is a critical component of cloud application security.
Leading-edge solutions like AppTrana provide highly tailored security, designed with surgical accuracy by certified security experts. AppTrana effectively protects against a wide range of existing and emerging threats, including DDoS attacks, bot attacks, and vulnerability exploits.
- Strong identity management and access controls based on the principle of least privilege. These define which users/ user groups get access to what resources/ data.
- Data encryption/ masking for the privacy and security of confidential and sensitive information. This is often a regulatory requirement.
- Dynamic threat intelligence to keep track of the evolving threat landscape.
- Proper configuration of security settings to minimize data exposure and secure vulnerabilities arising from security misconfigurations.
- Incidence response plans include regular data backup, user education, and so on, to enable the organization to recover quickly from a security incident/ natural disaster.
Main Risks Associated with Cloud Computing Security
The main objective of cloud computing security is to minimize the risks that organizations facing continuously and ensure business continuity even in the face of an attack.
- Data breach and IP theft/ loss
- Identity theft
- Unauthorized access to mission-critical assets
- Malware infections
- DDoS attacks
- Compliance violence, regulatory actions, and legal costs
- Loss of control over actions of end-users
- Financial damage and revenue losses
- Breach of trust of stakeholders (customers/ partners/ employees, etc.) and diminished reputation
What are the Benefits of Cloud Security?
1. 24×7 Visibility
The best cloud security solutions like AppTrana enable 24×7 monitoring of the application and cloud-based assets. This helps organizations to have continuous visibility into their risk posture and its impact on the business.
2. Higher Availability
Cloud computing security solutions typically have built-in redundancies to ensure that the application/ resources are always available. The CDNs used have distributed global networks of edge servers that deliver content optimally, accelerate application performance, and minimize access to the server. Together, they handle traffic surges in a way that on-premises/ hardware solutions cannot.
3. Effective protection against DDoS Attacks
Cloud security solutions provide the most effective protection against DDoS attacks, which are increasing in numbers, magnitude, sophistication, and severity. Cloud computing security helps to continuously monitor, identify, analyze, and mitigate DDoS attacks. The built-in redundancies, customizability, flexibility, scalability, and intelligence of such solutions can prevent volumetric, low, and slow attacks.
4. Data Security
The best cloud computing security solutions provide data security by design. They have security protocols and policies such as strong access controls and data encryption to prevent unauthorized entities from accessing confidential information.
5. Pay as you Go Model
The cloud security model ensures that you pay only for what you use and consume as opposed to making any upfront investment.
6. Advanced Threat Detection
By using end-point scanning and global threat intelligence, cloud computing security can detect threats more easily. This helps in assessing the risks facing the organization’s mission-critical assets vis-à-vis the threat landscape.
7. Regulatory Compliance
Top-notch cloud application security providers help to ensure regulatory standards and industry-specific compliance needs. This is done through its enhanced infrastructure and managed security services.
Conclusion
Even though many organizations continue to believe that on-premise and hardware-based security is more secure, it is quite the opposite. The benefits of cloud security amply highlight how cloud security has an edge over on-premise security. Choose the right cloud security provider to ensure the enhanced security of your cloud-hosted assets.
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Originally published at https://www.indusface.com.
