What is Cloud Data Security – Risks and Best Practices
Cloud data security is the practice of protecting data and other digital information stored in the cloud from data breaches, unauthorized access, and insider threats. With more than 60% of enterprise data stored in the cloud, businesses need to understand that cloud data security is crucial to avoid data theft, reputation damage, financial loss, and compliance risks. Organizations often use a combination of cloud, multi-cloud, on-premises, and hybrid infrastructure. This means they store huge amounts of sensitive data in multiple locations. As a result, organizations often fail to realize where their confidential data is kept, who uses it, and whether it is protected. This is why, cybercriminals have turned to the cloud, to steal highly valuable corporate and personally identifiable information (PII). In this blog, you’ll learn about cloud data security, common security risks associated with cloud data, and steps organizations can take to protect their sensitive data. What is Cloud Data Security? Cloud data security refers to the strategies and techniques that protect the data stored in a cloud environment. Simply put, cloud data security protects the data that is at rest or moving (in transit) from unauthorized access, theft, security threats, and corruption. Data security policies should be a priority for organizations using cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. Cloud Data Security includes: Why Companies Need Cloud Data Security? Today, we are in the age of big data, where companies are generating, collecting, and storing vast amounts of data each second. This includes everything, from highly sensitive business or customer data to less sensitive marketing and behavioral analytics. The growing volumes of data need to be accessed, managed, and analyzed properly. This is why, organizations are adopting multiple cloud services to make their operations agile and support remote or hybrid workforces. The traditional network perimeter is rapidly disappearing, making the security teams rethink their strategies for securing cloud data. With data and applications now operating outside traditional data centers and more employees working remotely, companies must find effective ways to protect data and control access as it moves across multiple environments. Core Principles of Cloud Data Security Cloud data security policies follow the same three principles of information security and data governance. These principles are: These three broad pillars – Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability – often referred to as the “CIA Triad” represent the core concepts essential for robust and effective security infrastructure in any organization. Any attack, vulnerability, or security incident is likely to compromise one or more of these principles. Therefore, security professionals use this framework to assess potential risks to an organization’s data assets. Benefits of Cloud Data Security Along with protecting sensitive data, cloud data security also benefits companies in many ways, like: 1. Better Data Visibility Strong cloud data security protocols allow you to maintain visibility into the cloud’s inner workings. This includes the data assets you have and their locations, the users of your cloud services, and the types of data they are accessing. 2. Seamless Backups and Recovery Cloud data security provides various solutions and features to automate and standardize backups. This helps relieve your teams from monitoring manual backups and troubleshooting problems. Additionally, cloud-based disaster recovery allows you to restore and recover data and applications within minutes. 3. Avoid Cyberattacks Cloud data security measures reduce the success rate of cyberattacks. For example, implementing data access controls makes it hard for attackers to access sensitive data. Additionally, other data control measures like “encryption” make the data unreadable even if they find a way to breach. 4. Comply with Data Regulations Not complying with data privacy and protection laws leads to costly fines and legal problems. For example, if a company violates the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it can be fined up to €10 million or 2% of the company’s global annual revenue. Different regions and industries have different data laws like ISO 27001, SOC 2, and HIPPA. Cloud data security measures like penetration testing help you comply with these regulations. 5. Maintain Customer Trust and Brand Reputation 72% of business leaders believe that reputation is the bigger driver of business performance than any other factor. Every data breach that hits the headlines hampers the company’s brand reputation. Additionally, if you can’t show people that you can protect their data, they won’t want to buy from you. Therefore, cloud data security is essential if you want to preserve your brand reputation and attract loyal customers. Cloud Data Security Challenges As data and applications move away from the central data center and traditional security measures, the risk of exposure becomes high. While many core aspects of on-premises data security remain, they need to be adjusted for the cloud environment. Common data protection challenges in the cloud or hybrid environment include: Cloud Data Security Best Practices By following these practices, you can secure sensitive data in your cloud environments. 1. Identify Sensitive Data Before you try to secure cloud data, you need to identify the sensitive information within your organization and where it is located. To achieve visibility into critical data and assess static data risk, you need to identify and classify both structured and unstructured sensitive data across: 2. Classify Data Using Context Once you know where your sensitive data is located, you need to classify them according to: The classification process should involve how the data is transferred within the organization, who uses it, and how they use it. 3. Limit Access to Data Once all data has been identified and classified, you can then set user access permissions. Access should be limited to as minimum as possible, granting each user the least amount of access required to fulfill their job responsibilities. You can use a combination of: 4. Encrypt Data Almost all compliance regulations mandate organizations to encrypt data both at rest and in transit. Encryption makes data unreadable unless the user has the decryption key. Even if someone gains unauthorized access to the data, they won’t be able