We see an unprecedented rise in organizations’ reliability upon the cloud for meeting their customers’ needs and business goals. Cloud security has become an important element of consideration. Today, more than ever, businesses and leaders need to address cloud security risks and misconfigured public cloud services.
According to reports, a staggering 45% of data breaches originate in the cloud, highlighting the growing risk, and a concerning 69% of organizations have suffered data breaches or exposures due to vulnerabilities in their multi-cloud setups. These numbers make it clear that although businesses understand that cloud adoption brings numerous advantages to their business that they can’t afford to miss, they are also well-aware of the security concerns they can’t afford to ignore.
Businesses and security leaders must have regular checkpoints with their cloud service providers on what measures are being taken periodically to prevent the risks hackers pose to your data.
Here are 9 questions every senior executive should ask their cloud service provider to understand the security implications to which the provider must have the answers.
1.Is our cloud environment out of compliance?
The fact that no organization using the cloud operates in an environment that’s completely in compliance with regulatory and security policies makes it important for you to know whether your environment is and isn’t in compliance. This is important for laying out a plan accordingly and bringing everything into compliance.
Moreover, your security team should review internal enterprise security policies from time to time and see if your use cases are adequately addressed and new attack vectors are identified. Having a process to bring your environment into compliance is a must.
2.How many vulnerabilities did we identify and eliminate?
Your cloud security should improve with time as your team becomes better at identifying and resolving security issues. For this, you need to have enough information about the existing misconfiguration vulnerabilities in your environment and the number of remediation per day. Thankfully, this process can be automated making your team’s work easier.
Cloud security professionals with domain expertise can also help you understand the way major cloud breaches happen and help you create policy as code to check if your organization’s cloud infrastructure has the same conditions.
3.Did we prevent the deployment of any vulnerabilities?
Discovering the vulnerabilities and restoring them isn’t enough. You must also know the steps taken by your security team to avoid such misconfigurations. In case you fail to resolve the issues, it would be hard to achieve business results with the same problems occurring again and again in different forms.
So, here are some important considerations you must keep in mind. One, your team should have security built into continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines and should check infrastructure as code (a means of deploying cloud infrastructure programmatically) to find and fix misconfigurations pre-deployment, when safer and more efficient. If infrastructure as code and CI/CD pipelines have been adopted, make sure you have a plan to include security into these processes.
4.Where is my cloud data being stored? Is it secure?
The server your data is stored on can be anywhere in the world. We all want to keep our information private. Hence, it’s essential for you to know where your data is stored and ensure that your organization follows regulations like HIPAA and GDPR. You should also know the simple ways to boost your data’s security beyond what’s built into systems used by your company.
5.What is the impact of security on productivity?
When organizations adopt to cloud, their main goal is to make the digital transformation as efficient and smooth as possible in order to cultivate innovation and growth. However, security can become a major hindrance in achieving the desired outcomes in the expected time if application developers wait too long for building the infrastructure. Getting security reviewed and infrastructure approved by DevSecOps is also a time-consuming process. You have to measure the time being invested in these tasks and see how the process can be time efficient. The aim should be to invest more time in creating value for your customers and not in insufficient security processes affecting your team’s productivity.
For this, have a security transformation strategy that allows you to respond and scale quickly to changes, increase resiliency, reduce costs, and deploy anywhere.
6.Do all teams have what they need to succeed?
Modern business settings cannot operate without leadership that promotes collaboration and emphasizes teamwork. In order to best deal with security concerns, your organization must have an integrated approach that runs across all teams and cost centers. If the developers identify and fix some issues, this should be reflected in security investment on time the efforts will go to waste.
What’s also important is to provide training to your employees on cloud security and solutions so that they have enough skills required to take responsibility for preventing security breaches.
7.How are we expressing security policies?
Cloud security policies are either written and reviewed by people or maintained using policy as code. The former doesn’t make your cloud environments secure as breaches can happen in minutes while manually reviewing and enforcing policies take way more time. On the other hand, the policy as code provides accurate interpretation quickly making the process of evaluating cloud structure ultra-efficient.
It is possible to express exceptions as code to ensure that everything is well documented when the application of a security policy changes from one deployment to another.
8.What will failure look like?
In not so impossible scenario, you may experience a cloud breach hitting your company hard. The consequences of cloud breaches are severe. Past records prove that major breaches cannot just damage a company’s reputation, and cause customers to leave, but can even lead to its closure. It would be catastrophic to have a security breach in an age where data leaks are too sensitive a topic. So, what should you do to avoid dealing with such consequences?
Implement a policy that asks for regular reporting about your company’s cloud security posture. Have all the answers to questions like how many vulnerabilities your existing infrastructure has, what steps are being taken to remediate them and how many are being eliminated every day.
9.Does my business have a solid data deletion plan in place?
At some point, you may want to remove all your data from a cloud environment. You must therefore have a plan in advance that allows you to do this without any issues and ensure that the data is also removed from the cloud provider’s servers. This is necessary to avoid the chances of your data being accessed and misused.
Conclusion
Although the cloud comes with various benefits like greater scalability, more efficient workflow, and reduced IT costs, it also comes with the risks of your company’s data being exposed. While the existing demands of the market make cloud adoption indispensable, we surely can avoid major mishaps related to security by asking the above-mentioned 9 questions to our cloud service providers about security. Moreover, we must ensure that security is provided without having to deploy multiple tools and make separate decisions.
Get help from the right cloud expert well versed in cloud security at Rapyder to protect your business and start your digital transformation journey today.
