Is Your Business Cloud Secure? 4 Considerations

The cloud is a critical component of modern business operations, but as important as it is, many companies don’t really know how this digital space functions or, vitally, how to keep it secure. So, what does it mean to secure the cloud? There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for this pressing concern, but factoring in these four considerations can go a long way towards minimizing the threat posed by hackers.

It Starts With Governance

The first step towards securing your business’s cloud environment is ensuring that your organization has a plan. Referred to as cloud governance, the concept essentially refers to the act of having a set of rules that order your approach to IT infrastructure. These include both personal and institution-wide practices meant to prevent security breaches, which may mean everything from ensuring staff change their passwords frequently to training staff to identify phishing attacks.

Choose The Right Platforms

Governance is an important part of protecting your organization’s data in the cloud, but at a time when much of what we do happens in the cloud, not all platforms are created equally. When choosing an information security management system (ISMS), then, it’s important to choose carefully, since not every platform will really protect your data.

Top platforms prioritize confidentiality, integrity, and information availability by providing a range of security controls, audit management, and other tools. Not sure how to confirm those elements? Look for tools that meet the ISO 27001 standard and know that you can proceed with confidence.

Divide And Conquer

One of the biggest mistakes that businesses make when relying on the cloud for key operations is failing to segment information so that access is limited to just those who need it. Often they fail to do this because it can take extra steps. But in some cases, organizations simply don’t consider the added risk that comes with broad access.

Rather than defaulting to widespread information access, all companies – not just those relying on the cloud for information management – should choose a privileged access management strategy for their content rather than a more general one. Privileged access may seem to slow things down by forcing your organization to issue new approvals or change settings whenever an individual’s scope of work expands, but better to cause a brief delay in this regard than to open the doors to hackers.

Know – And Fix – Your Vulnerabilities

Every network has vulnerabilities, no matter how careful you are to attend to your systems, so your goal shouldn’t be to eliminate all of them; new ones will keep popping up. Instead, you should prioritize staying alert to common risks and doing what you can to mitigate them. 

For example, many businesses encourage staff to use a VPN for security when traveling, but VPNs are notoriously indiscriminate. By assuming all devices are trustworthy, they end up creating more vulnerability. This is an important reminder that sometimes the simple things you do to improve security can actually open the door to more threats, so it’s important to do your homework.

Learning to operate entirely in the cloud is still a challenge for many businesses, so you’re hardly alone if you’re worried that there are gaps in your governance strategy. All you can do is examine your existing practices, talk to the experts, and keep making improvements so that your data isn’t a desirable target.

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