Rather than owning their servers, modern companies tend to rent storage and application access through cloud-based services for a subscription fee. It makes perfect sense as it's much cheaper to outsource infrastructure to cloud service providers. They'll take care of maintenance with better flexibility if you suddenly need to scale up your operations.
On the flip side, external storing your data makes it much more susceptible to online attacks. Hackers are adapting to changing business preferences—cloud server misconfigurations caused some of 2023's most significant data breaches. This elevates the importance of data security measures.
In turn, most organizations are looking into balancing the benefits of cloud computing while trying to protect data and overcome risks associated with externally kept data. Over time, this has evolved into a separate discipline known as cloud data protection. Here's what you should know about it.
What is cloud data protection?
Cloud data protection is a collective term for policies, technologies, and applications to secure cloud-based data. Its best practices should cover all stages of data moving in and out of a cloud environment, including long-term archiving and in-transit when uploaded from the user's device.
Organizations use the cloud in various deployment and service models, and cloud data protection helps set the proper controls to ensure data security. This framework is independent of who owns or supervises the network. The main goal is to provide cloud security and safeguard any weaknesses in cloud infrastructure, such as:
Deterrent: Policies intended to ward off potential attackers. While most hackers ignore them anyway, it does help to repel those who are less experienced or are looking for easily exploitable networks.
Preventative: Policies and applications directly contribute to the system's resilience against unauthorized access. Firewalls, endpoint protection, and two-factor authentication help minimize the attack surface a hacker could use to its advantage.
Detective: Controls intended to detect and monitor ongoing or past incidents. Usually, preventative and detective controls work in tandem, i.e., suspicious behavior automatically triggers a system-wide lockdown to prevent data loss.
Corrective: Various methods limit the damage after the incident has already happened. They could range from written post-mortem detailing the attack to regular data backup plans.
Why is it essential to protect data in the cloud?
Nowadays, it's common for a company to store sensitive data or corporate data in public, private, and hybrid clouds. While this arrangement frees the company's internal IT department from maintenance and the need to set up a physical server, it also exposes a company to numerous security challenges:
Cloud providers and companies usually share responsibilities to ensure data security. So, while a cloud provider provides some of its data protection in the cloud, the client may not always have a full view of its infrastructure. Cloud data protection helps address these visibility issues.
The shared responsibility model doesn't always mean that both parties clearly understand their responsibilities.
Organizations might not even know where their data is stored. The cloud provider can move it across the infrastructure without the organization's knowledge. Sometimes, multiple clients can use the same server.
Public clouds have a much larger volume of incoming and outgoing traffic, making it harder to pinpoint suspicious connections.
If an organization relies on multiple cloud providers, the security may be inconsistent, which hackers could exploit. Enhanced data security measures are essential to protect data in such scenarios.
Some data may be subject to regulatory compliance, requiring appropriate security measures for its protection.
Challenges of cloud data protection
Securing data within cloud environments is fraught with complexities. Here are some key challenges:
Visibility limitations: Multi-cloud setups reduce visibility and control over corporate data. Due to shared responsibility models in cloud environments, tracking the location and status of the company's data is challenging.
Complex data interactions: Data distribution across various applications and environments complicates the enforcement of strict access controls.
Data encryption constraints: While encryption is crucial for protecting sensitive data at rest, it's not always possible in cloud settings, which can leave data vulnerable. Also, encryption of data in transit makes it hard to detect potential leaks.
Configuration management issues: The complexity of ensuring all configurations are correctly set up can lead to data exposure, especially if sensitive data ends up in publicly accessible areas.
Need for cloud-focused security solutions: Traditional security solutions fall short in cloud environments. This calls for tailored security strategies and tools essential for robust cloud data protection.
Cloud data protection: best practices
You can do a lot to improve cloud-hosted data security. Here are the best industry practices for mitigating cloud data protection risks.
Have a clear division of responsibilities
The data center isn't responsible for server security. It just provides a framework on which to build. Usually, it only includes hardware and software for its management. The configurations, however, typically fall on the client.
Your overall security status will depend on both parties sharing the responsibility of ensuring data security in the cloud. It will only work if both parties have clear responsibilities and each carries out its share.
Do your research
Before shaking hands with a provider, you should look into what tools it offers for remote data and access management. If compliance regulations apply to your industry, ensure your cloud provider has the proper certificates. If you're using an uncertified provider, you may not meet the compliance standards.
Remember to find out everything else about your provider—look for any previous data breach reports and see if your provider's name pops up. The more you know beforehand, the easier it will be to decide.
Secure gaps between systems
The more cloud environments you rely on, the more gaps in your infrastructure that malicious individuals could exploit. It's the organization's responsibility to identify these and implement potential solutions.
It's not enough to trust that the cloud provider vendor will take care of everything and that there's no need to do anything else. Implementing additional measures, like Cloud VPN services, will help you control the hosted data and ensure its security status.
Encrypt everything
Data encryption should be a standard practice for all cloud resources. It's one way of preventing data breaches. It ensures that if someone gains access to the server, they can't read its contents without the private key, enhancing cloud security.
Encrypting files before transfer to cloud storage is also a good practice. In addition, you can fragment your data into shards and store them across multiple clouds. Even if a hacker could access a small amount of data, it would remain useless.
Strict access permissions
Ensure only the users who need to access the data can access it. Enforce strong credential policies and add additional IP allowlists to allow only specific IP ranges to connect to your network.
Audit your permissions and set your credential lifecycle terms. Avoid password reuse and keep your passwords constantly refreshed to prevent other database dumps from affecting your database's security.
Secure end-user devices
User-controlled endpoints are the most susceptible part of your network infrastructure. Private gadgets used at work or as a part of the bring your own device (BYOD) policy can be a severe threat. They can function as an attack vector to gain entry into your cloud environment.
To prevent this, you should monitor active traffic, restrict traffic on your network perimeter, and restrict what data can exit or enter your systems.
Have an exit strategy
With your cloud-hosting vendor, devising an incident response plan outlining the actions taken after the data breach would help. A written plan will help you react quickly and recover from the shock.
Dedicate some sections to when a data breach occurs to give you additional insights into what should happen when the detection software finds an unauthorized agent on your internal network.
Main cloud data protection benefits
Adopting the right cloud data security measures ensures your company's data privacy and improves network security. Here are the key benefits of cloud data security
Active security risk mitigation. Keeping data outside the company allows one to have a complete overview of what data is going in and out of the server—via active monitoring.
Govern data access. Partition cloud servers can allow specific users into specific servers with varying levels of access rights. Allow better control of who can access what files and which files were downloaded by whom.
Data and security policies. Implementing cloud network protection usually involves an action plan detailing many internal practices. This can often be a good starting point for developing fully-fledged data and security policies to prepare an organization better to withstand any cyber threats that it could experience in the future.
Preventing data loss. Cloud data protection connects to broader data loss prevention. It should have other benefits related to minimizing risks of accidental employee leaks, which could further complicate data access segmentation.
Protect your cloud data with NordLayer
Achieve cloud data security by implementing the Zero Trust security model and transitioning to the SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) framework, which uses a cloud framework to deliver network security solutions.
NordLayer provides a flexible network security solution that easily integrates into your current infrastructure. It boosts data and cloud security while facilitating remote work.
Contact our team to discover an easy way to increase the security of your cloud data, no matter where it's stored.
