Here are tips and strategies on how you can address cloud computing security concerns effectively.
How to Address Cloud Computing Security Concerns
Cloud Data Protection (CDP) refers to the ability to protect data in any cloud environment. It is the “capability of an organization to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data when stored within a cloud environment”. But, CDP does not protect data at rest.
Cloud Data Security (CDS) refers to the ability to protect data at rest and in transit in a cloud environment. This includes encryption and tokenization.
While cloud computing presents issues and concerns in security, here are tips on how you can deal with them effectively.
1. Establish a security framework.
Make sure to align your security framework with your cloud computing infrastructure. This includes an incident response plan and a change management process.
2. Establish compliance and audit requirements.
Ensure users and applications using cloud computing follow security policies and procedures.
Also, make sure that all employees, including staff and third parties, follow security policies and procedures.
3. Have a security training program
Have staff and third parties go through security training. Training is vital because it equips your employees and everyone including the executives. It does not only add to your credibility but it helps avoid any incident or attack from succeeding.
4. Ensure there are strict controls over data.
Make sure to have proper authorization and access controls to ensure data is properly protected. These include roles, policies, procedures, audits, identity management, multi-factor authentication, encryption, monitoring, and logging.
5. Make sure to have an incident response plan in place.
Have a plan for responding to incidents should they occur. This includes damage assessment, containment, eradication, and recovery. Make sure to have backup copies of data should it be lost or stolen. Also, have a plan on how to recover your data and minimize the effects of an attack.
6. Ensure there is proper protection at the physical level.
Make sure to protect your data center and its physical environment. This includes intrusion detection systems, guards and cameras, authentication protocols and authorization, encryption, authorization, and access controls.
6. Encrypt all data at rest.
Encrypt sensitive data using a key management mechanism such as a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) or hardware security module (HSM). Encryption is effective in preventing unauthorized access to your data even if it falls into wrong hands.
Also, deploying encryption can optimize performance and lower costs associated with cloud computing. Thus, encryption at rest is applicable for both public and private cloud computing.
7. Encrypt all traffic in transit.
Encrypting traffic in transit is applicable for both public and private cloud computing. It also prevents attackers from gaining access to your data. Besides, SSL encryption is one way of doing this effectively.
However, you should not rely on it solely since it will not prevent an attacker from stealing or manipulating your data while it is being transmitted across the network enclave or while it is temporarily stored in the memory of a network component outside of the enclave.
Transport Layer Security (TLS) is another way of encrypting traffic in transit but TLS should be used instead of SSL since TLS will enable you to verify the identity of the network endpoint to which you are communicating before you transmit any sensitive information over the network enclave.
