In recent years, the pace of cloud adoption has increased significantly. Today, nearly all organizations utilize some type of cloud-based services, with some opting for multi-cloud deployments involving various providers. To safeguard sensitive and valuable data stored in the cloud, it is crucial to implement appropriate security measures.
Failure to do so can result in security misconfigurations that render data vulnerable to unauthorized access and potential breaches. It is essential to encrypt data both when at rest and in transit and establish a robust set of access controls to ensure that only authorized parties have access to confidential information. Furthermore, firms should regularly monitor data access and cloud security settings for anomalies or mistakes that could jeopardize information stored in the cloud.
In this blog, we will go through the ins and outs of data protection in the cloud, including some cloud data protection best practices. Let’s get started.
What is Cloud Data Protection?
Cloud data protection refers to the measures and techniques used to secure data that is stored, processed, and transmitted on cloud computing platforms. It involves implementing security controls to prevent unauthorized access, theft, loss, or corruption of data in the cloud.
Data protection in the cloud typically includes encryption, access controls, and monitoring of user activity. Encryption is the process of converting data into a secret code that can only be deciphered by authorized users with the right decryption key. Access controls restrict who can access data, and monitoring allows for the detection and response to potential security threats.
Following cloud data protection best practices is important because it ensures the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data in the cloud. By implementing strong security measures, organizations can protect their sensitive data from cyber-attacks and data breaches.
Why is Cloud Data Protection Important?
Cloud data protection is important for several reasons, here are some of them:
- Security: Data protection in the cloud ensures that sensitive data is kept secure from unauthorized access, theft, or loss. This is especially important for organizations that deal with confidential or personal data, such as financial or medical records.
- Compliance: Many industries have regulatory requirements for data protection, such as HIPAA for healthcare or GDPR for companies that handle EU citizen data. Data protection in the cloud helps organizations comply with these regulations and avoid fines or legal penalties.
- Business Continuity: Following cloud data protection best practices helps organizations to maintain business continuity by providing a secure and reliable environment for data storage and processing. This ensures that data is always available, even in the event of a disaster or system failure.
- Reputation: A data breach can be damaging to an organization’s reputation and lead to loss of customer trust. Cloud data protection can help prevent breaches and demonstrate to customers that the organization takes data security seriously.
Cloud Data Protection Challenges
There are several challenges associated with securing data in the cloud that may contribute to why you would want to follow cloud data protection best practices. These include:
Limited Visibility
Due to the complex nature of multi-cloud infrastructures that companies commonly use, it can be challenging to know where your sensitive data is stored, thus making it difficult to keep it secure. Likewise, with data spread across multiple applications hosted on-premises and in various cloud environments, it can be difficult to define effective access controls that adhere to the least privilege principle.
Encryption
Encryption is vital to secure data at rest, but it may not always be available in cloud environments. Additionally, many applications encrypt data in transit, which can make it difficult to identify sensitive data leaving the network.
Configuration Management
Configuring security settings for cloud infrastructure can be complicated, with each cloud service provider having their own set of security settings. Given that a number of high-profile data breaches have been caused by misconfigured storage containers, it is crucial that organizations check the relevant settings to ensure that no storage containers are publicly accessible by default.
Cloud Security Solutions
Since cloud environments pose unique security challenges that differ from those of on-prem environments, securing cloud data requires specialized security solutions designed specifically for cloud environments.
Best Practices for Cloud Data Protection
Below are some of the best practices for data protection in the cloud:
Know What You’re Protecting
To enhance data security in the cloud, organizations need to start with identifying what data they are protecting. Conducting a complete audit of cloud data stored in the cloud will allow organizations to design and implement solutions that best protect their data.
Use Data Encryption
Encryption is an effective way to protect data from unauthorized access, making it an essential step in securing cloud-based data. Data should be encrypted both at rest and in transit within cloud environments.
Never Trust, Always Verify
Zero trust is a security strategy that focuses on limiting access to sensitive data to ensure that users and applications only have access to the systems and data they need to do their job. This helps to contain security breaches, whether they are caused by internal or external threat actors.
Monitor Security Settings
Cloud environments have a variety of security settings that must be correctly configured to secure data and applications hosted within the environment. Use a Data-Centric Audit & Protection (DCAP) solution to identify any changes to security configurations in real-time.
Plan for Data Loss
No best practices list for data protection in the cloud would be complete without addressing the risks of data loss in addition to data leakage. Organizations should create secure backups of their cloud data, and these backups should be protected at the same level as the original data.
How Lepide Helps to Secure Your Cloud Data
The Lepide Data Security platform helps you to implement many of the best practices for cloud data protection that we went through above. The platform will aggregate event data from multiple cloud platforms, which include; Office 365, Dropbox, Amazon S3, G Suite, and other platforms. It allows you to oversee modifications made to your sensitive information via a user-friendly dashboard that instantly notifies you upon detecting any abnormal activities.
Additionally, the integrated data classification feature will thoroughly scan your cloud storage containers for sensitive data and classify it accordingly. By knowing where your sensitive data resides, you can easily grant the right access controls.
The Lepide platform enables you to easily generate reports which provide a summary of all incidents related to your cloud-based data. These reports can be shared with the relevant authorities to demonstrate compliance.
Lepide uses machine learning models to establish a baseline of user activity, which can be tested against to identify anomalies. It can also detect and respond to events that match a pre-defined threshold condition.
If you’d like to see how the Lepide Data Security Platform can help to secure your cloud-based data, schedule a demo with one of our engineers.