Cloud Risk Academy

CASBs play a critical role in providing visibility into how businesses use the cloud. They enforce security and governance rules to mitigate the risk that cloud services or SaaS apps could become weak links in an organization’s security posture. Without a CASB, you may not know which applications, services, and data your business has exposed in cloud environments. How would you know if those resources are secure if you don’t know they exist?

Whether you offer Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) apps to customers, use SaaS apps yourself, or both, you need to be familiar with SOC 2 compliance. SOC 2 compliance rules provide a foundation for ensuring that sensitive data is managed in a secure way within the context of SaaS and other cloud-based services.

In modern cloud environments, security monitoring and periodic audits won’t suffice for detecting threats before they turn into breaches. Instead, to achieve an environment that is as secure as possible, you need Cloud Security Posture Management, or CSPM. CSPM lays the foundation for minimizing the number of risks that exist within your clouds. CSPM tools help to automate cloud security, keeping cloud environments secure even as they grow larger and more complex.

Whether you’ve gone fully cloud-native in your application design or you’re running monolithic applications in the cloud, cloud services form the foundation for most application deployment strategies today. Understanding how cloud services work, and how to keep them secure, is essential for virtually every modern organization.

One of the fundamental challenges you face with a cloud computing service like AWS is that you can’t implement all of the security controls that would be available to you on-premises, since you don’t have access to the physical infrastructure that powers your cloud environment. For example, you can’t set up the same types of network firewalls, because you don’t control your cloud provider’s network infrastructure. What you can do, however, is take advantage of solutions like AWS Security Groups, a powerful framework for controlling which network traffic can flow to and from cloud-based virtual machines.

The popularity of cloud computing has grown exponentially in recent years, reducing costs, improving availability of service, and driving collaboration. With increased access and infrastructure being hosted on public-facing, shared platforms, come security challenges that cannot be met using outdated controls from traditional data centers. Cloud vulnerabilities take many forms, and it has never been more important for organizations to secure their accounts, subscriptions, VPCs, access control lists, and security groups from threats.

Understanding which security challenges you face when deploying applications and data into cloud environments is the first step in securing your cloud. Those challenges may vary depending on how your cloud is configured and which clouds you use, but in general, the typical organization faces the following core challenges when it comes to cloud computing security.

AWS S3 makes it easy to upload virtually unlimited volumes of data to the cloud, and store it at little cost. Although there is nothing inherently insecure about S3, access control misconfigurations and a lack of understanding about how S3 security works can turn S3 buckets into a vector for attack and data exfiltration. If you use S3 to store data, it’s critical to know the risks that come with it and how to mitigate them.

While you may understand cloud security best practices that you should adhere to across multi-cloud environments, your security posture on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) relies on also addressing security challenges specific to the platform. You need to understand the Google shared responsibility model, distinctions between securing GCP and other clouds, and take advantage of the many tools available to secure your workloads hosted on the platform.

Shifting from on-prem to the cloud can open up significant possibilities for your organization. The cloud is economical, easily scalable, and can be accessible to users across your company. Along with the growth and flexibility it provides, moving to the cloud can also expose your organization to cyber security threats. It is essential that as your organization grows on the cloud, you also strive to protect your cloud-based environments, applications, and data.

While Microsoft Azure can provide growth and flexibility, moving to the cloud can expose your organization to cyber security threats. Keeping Azure workloads secure requires deploying the right security tools. Azure is subject to a variety of risks, so you need multiple tools to keep your environment secure. Although no one tool provides end-to-end security on its own, each does its part to help you maintain a strong security posture for Azure-based workloads.