The ease that cloud computing solutions bring to the table have helped revolutionise the business world. Simply put, leveraging cloud computing has become synonymous with an increasingly digitised environment.
As these solutions are easy to set up, cost-effective and ideal for businesses with limited resources, small and medium business enterprises are first in line to make the most of this handy virtualisation feature.
However, in their haste, SMBs often don’t realise that being on the cloud opens doors to security and data issues. It is therefore important to effectively manage your cloud security strategy and eliminate the loopholes in your business network.
Steps to Reduce Digital Threats in Cloud Computing
For effective business security management, it is crucial to take steps to reduce cloud security breaches, especially when your organisation heavily relies on it. For your IT and business environments to be safe and secure, you need to have robust and proactive IT planning and strategy in place.
To prevent security breaches in cloud computing, you need to dedicate proper time and effort towards securing your information on the cloud. Since digital threats come in a variety of forms and places, it is crucial to take steps to minimise these threats in a more holistic and comprehensive manner.
At Redpalm, we’ve put together a list of tips that’ll help you minimise data breaches in your cloud computing environment.
Let’s take a look!
1. Educating Your Employees
Many companies have found that time and again, one of the primary reasons for security breaches is uninformed employees. This is why it’s important to train them and get them up to speed about protocol for safe online practices. This will mitigate the digital threats at hand and help preempt any cloud computing breaches.
Ensure that you actively involve your whole organisation, because being involved first hand makes employees feel responsible on a personal level as they proactively take ownership of keeping your business network secure.
At Redpalm, we offer security training sessions that make employees understand best practices while making them more aware of digital security. We work with you to create a response protocol that will enable your employees to follow the correct procedures in different situations.
To ensure that everyone is on the same page from a cloud safety perspective, run some security tests to see if your employees take the right steps to keep your cloud environment secure.
2. Use IAM to Safeguard Privileged Account Access
The information stored in your cloud solutions is only as safe and secure as you keep it. If you end giving network access to everyone in your organisation, your data security is sure to be compromised. It is therefore important to give access to only a few relevant people. As an extra measure of security, authenticate them to use your cloud database.
Here, using Identity and Access Management or IAM solutions will come to your aid to prevent unauthorised access and internal security breaches in cloud computing networks. Since authenticated members have advanced user privileges and roles, you can clearly see who is using your cloud computing resources and how.
With Redpalm’s end to end unified IAM and endpoint suite, you can administer and manage member behaviour, detect unusual activity, trigger pre-configured responses while setting alerts to prevent and minimise digital threats in your cloud network.
Single Sign-On (SSO) and Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) are some of the basic features of a robust IAM system. As their name suggests, both features can keep user accounts from taking control of your cloud solutions while keeping key user accounts safe.
3. Reduce the Number of Organisational Downloads
When it comes to upholding airtight data and cloud security, the fewer versions of sensitive information you have stored on your in-house systems, the better. A simple way to curb the risk of data theft is to diligently limit the number of downloads.
For instance, if you are accessing confidential client information on the cloud, be sure to use the preview or the viewer function on the cloud instead of hitting the download button.
It will be pointless for your cloud provider to administer end-to-end encryption and 2FA only for an unreliable visitor to plug in a flash drive and steal the documents you’ve left on your personal computer.
4. Employ CASB Methods to Fortify Cloud Security
CASB or Closed Access Security Broker are systems that are managed and controlled by APIs for both large and small scale of operations. It effectively patrols cloud network activity and restricts access to any file or function that it deems is highly sensitive or risky; for example information distribution on the internet that’s not secure or downloading confidential documents.
Many businesses that use cloud storage by default use CASB systems. Since its functionality is per-user basis, the security measures applied would be the same across all endpoints and systems you access on the cloud.
When it comes to reducing cloud security threats, you need to ensure that you keep the information that you really need. Refrain from wasting software and hardware space on documents and files that are seemingly not that important. Ensure that you’re safely storing information that is sensitive away from prying eyes.
5. Data Encryption at Every Stage
When speaking of cloud computing and data security, encryption is a term that’s mentioned quite frequently. If used properly, encryption can add an extra shield of security to your data. Data requires encryption both when it is being stored on the cloud and also when it is being transferred.
Generally, organisations dedicate time and money to encrypt data that’s at rest. They probably do not realise that data that’s in transit is actually more at risk. There are chances that it encounters potential vulnerabilities while being moved from one location to another.
If you really wish to crack the code for proper data security to prevent breaches, you need to give some serious thought to data encryption both at rest and in motion. Additionally, encourage your employees to reset their passwords time and again as an added measure of cloud security.
Contact Redpalm to Reduce Cloud Security Breaches
It’s quite evident that cloud computing has a range of benefits that your organisation can leverage to propel your business. At the same time, it also poses quite a few concerns and challenges that you need to address for absolute end-to-end security.
Being prepared to fight these digital challenges is key to keep your business safe on the cloud. At Redpalm, we offer robust IT support solutions that will set your business a class apart in terms of network safety and security.
We offer premium IT consulting services along with digital security solutions and measures that ensure your cloud computing infrastructure is up to date and as secure as possible.
Give us a call today at 0333 006 3366 to further discuss safe cloud computing practices. For more information, you can drop us an email at info@redpalm.co.uk.
