In the year 2017, a top telecommunications firm faced a cloud computing security issue. A misconfigured AWS S3 bucket with improper settings was responsible for client’s data leakage. The firm reacted fast and restricted access, investigated, and informed affected clients right away. It collaborated with AWS, implementing stronger cyber security measures to avoid future occurrences to maintain customer trust and service integrity. In the digital era of today, when businesses increasingly adopt cloud computing as a cost-effective means of improving operations and scaling up, the role of cloud computing security cannot be overemphasized. On the other hand, the cloud technology brings to the table many benefits while its security pitfalls are equally as many and should be prioritized by organizations in order to protect their valuable assets and data.
“Security should be one of the main areas of focus for organisations looking to fully embrace the cloud journey but often, security has been secondary to business transformation. But as organisations move more applications, workloads and other areas of their business into the cloud, security needs to be front of mind. - Fabio Fratucello, Chief Technology Officer, Asia Pacific and Japan, CrowdStrike.
Therefore, businesses should be aware of the major cloud computing security risks and ways of dealing with them.
One of the prominent cyber security threats that have been facing organizations that utilize cloud computing services are data breaches. The attacks are caused by different reasons such as the unauthorized access, the malware infections or the misconfigured security settings. In order to reduce the risk of data breaches, it is very important to introduce strong access controls, encryption methods and multi-factor authentication. Performing regular security audits and compliance assessments can further the goal of identifying and addressing potential issues in a proactive manner.
Data breaches can inflict huge financial and reputational losses for organizations because the confidential data like client information, intellectual property, and money transactions may be compromised. This means that both organizations and their vendors should have a multi-layered approach to cloud security which involves encryption of data at rest and in transit, strong authentication mechanisms and continuous monitoring of network traffic for suspicious activity.
The cyber security challenges of cloud computing are also posed by insider threats, whether such threats are intentional, or not. Security can be compromised either accidently when employees, contractors, or third- party vendors having access to sensitive data show negligence or intentionally engage in malicious activities. To reduce insider threats, organizations should put in place strong access controls, have in place monitoring and auditing mechanisms, and provide all employees with comprehensive training on how to use IT security in the best way possible. Moreover, following the least privilege rule leads to minimizing the scope of impacts caused by insider threats.
Detecting and resolving insider threats can be quite an uphill task as the perpetrators are quite often individuals in the organization who have legitimate access to resources, which they are abusing for malicious purposes. Hence, companies need to deploy strong identity and access management (IAM) systems which should be used to control users’ access to sensitive data and monitor their activity for signs of suspicious behavior. Education and security awareness training for the company’s employees can further increase the knowledge of the risks posed by insider threats and foster the culture of security within the organization.
A data loss can be caused by many different reasons: hardware faults, software bugs and malicious attacks. With cloud computing, organizations should deploy dependable data backup and recovery systems in order to prevent data loss and thereby reduce the risk. Regular multiple backups of the data to the on-site and remote storage facilities will guarantee data resiliency and continuity of operations. Adding encryption of backups and access controls will also help in hardening the data protection measures in case of a security breach.
Data loss can incur huge losses to organizations such as break-down of operations, loss of revenue and bad reputation. Hence, organizations should have effective data backup and recovery procedures that maintain the availability and honesty of vital data. This includes testing of the backup systems and procedures on a regular basis to ensure that they have the ability to function if data is lost.
Account hijacking is a situation where unauthorized persons log into user accounts through various means that include, but not limited to, phishing attacks and stolen credentials. If the account is hacked, it is not only possible to gain access to the data, but also to manipulate the resources and launch further cyber-attacks. To avoid the threat of account breaching, organizations should set multi-factor authentication, password policies and user education programs to make their users aware of phishing and social engineering tricks. In addition, there should be account activity monitoring regularly because such a measure could detect malicious behavior and stop unauthorized access.
An account hijack can result in undesirable outcomes for organizations like unauthorized access to private information, system parameter manipulation and business operation disruption. Hence, it is necessary that organizations implement strong authentication mechanisms, such as multi-factor authentication, to keep account access secure from unauthorized users. Furthermore, these organizations must educate users on the critical role of creating strong, unique passwords while they should also be aware of common phishing scams that can, otherwise, be a threat to their credentials.
Most cloud computing services are API based thereby making it easy for communication and integration between different systems and services. Nevertheless, API insecurity can be a huge cyber security vulnerability as it allows an attacker to access or manipulate sensitive data without authorization. To diminish the threat, organizations need to do a thorough security review of the third-party APIs before integrating them into their systems. Employing encryption, access controls, and authentication procedures is a way of securing the API endpoints and locking them against unauthorized access or modification.
Insecure APIs can serve the attackers as a bridge to reach the confidential data and system resources, with which they can penetrate the security system and launch the cyber-attacks. That is why an organization must thoroughly examine the security framework of a third-party API before incorporating it. This comprises the performance of the API provider’s security practices, analyzing documentation and specifications for security vulnerabilities, as well as thorough testing to detect and manage any possible risks.
One of the challenges organizations using the cloud encounter is the lack of the infrastructure and data visibility and control. The difficulty of maintaining an overall picture of security posture is a result of the cloud services and platforms storing and processing the data in multiple environments. Organizations can minimize the risk by deploying the centralized security management tools and platforms that provide real-time visibility into cloud assets, configurations, and security events. Moreover, the use of cloud-native security solutions and services allows automating security processes and making sure that all cloud environments will have proper security policies applied consistently.
Due to lack of visibility and control, cloud computing security posture can be left open, giving attackers a chance to take advantage of vulnerabilities and undetectably launch cyber security attacks. Therefore, it is vital for organizations to utilize robust security monitoring and management tools that give them a clear picture of the security landscape in their cloud infrastructure plus data. This can be realized by monitoring the network traffic, system logs, and the user’s activity for indicators of suspicious activity and also implementing automated response mechanisms that will help in mitigating cyber security threats in real-time.
In summation, although cloud computing brings plenty of flexibilities and scalability and cost-efficiency to the table, there are still security risks that need to be dealt with to protect data and assets of organizations. Through the implementation of strong cloud computing security features like access controls, encryption, multi-factor authentication and regular security audits, organizations can successfully mitigate these risks and assure data security in the cloud.
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