What is cloud security?
Cloud security is defined as a collection of policies, processes, controls, and technologies used to protect data and infrastructure in computing environments. It requires organizations to ensure the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of data by following a set of practices. Some of these practices include encrypting data, continuously monitoring cloud environments, ensuring compliance, securing access control policies, and creating effective incident response plans.
Cloud security measures must extend across all cloud types—public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments—as well as various service models, including SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and Function as a Service (FaaS). To achieve effective cloud security, it's important to have a well-designed cloud security architecture alongside a clear understanding of the shared responsibility model. This is relevant for organizations of all sizes and industries.
While the task of achieving cloud security may seem daunting, several established cloud security frameworks, such as the NIST, FedRAMP, and CSA STAR, offer structured guidance and best practices to streamline the security process.
Types of cloud environments
- Public cloud environments: Public cloud environments, like Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's AWS, are services and infrastructure provided by external service providers over the internet. While these environments don't significantly impact an organization's budget, they give rise to certain new risks of data exposure due to third-party handling. If you're concerned about attacks on your AWS environment, here's how to stay safe while making the most of the benefits that AWS can give you.
- Private cloud environments: In private cloud models, the services and infrastructure are maintained by an organization privately. Access to these services is limited to a small group of users who belong to the organization. The cloud services are also customized to suit the organization's needs. Although using a private cloud does mean a far higher financial investment for the organization than with a public cloud, there is lower risk of data exposure.
- Hybrid cloud environments: Hybrid cloud models are a blended type of cloud computing that allows organizations to leverage the scalability and cost advantages of the public cloud model while also investing in some private cloud infrastructure for the protection of sensitive data.
- Multi-cloud environments: Multi-cloud models encompass strategically chosen cloud combinations that could include services rendered from multiple public cloud environments or multiple private cloud environments.
The cloud security architecture at your organization should be customized for the type of cloud environment you choose. Numerous organizations today prefer multi-cloud environments.
Types of cloud service models
Cloud service models outline the different ways an organization can utilize cloud services.
- SaaS: SaaS is a model where users access services through the internet and pay only for the services they have enrolled in. Examples include Log360 Cloud, Zoho One, and Google Workspace.
- IaaS: IaaS is a cloud service model where the service provider rents all necessary computational infrastructure to users, including storage, servers, virtual machines, networking, security, and deployment tools, while users handle data, apps, runtime, and middleware.
- FaaS: FaaS is a serverless computing approach used in microservice development, allowing users or developers to focus on their code while the cloud service provider hosts and administers back-end services.
- PaaS: PaaS is a cloud service model where a third-party provider hosts all necessary hardware, software, and development tools for users, allowing them to develop, execute, and manage applications without the need for servers or storage. Examples include AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Google Kubernetes Engine.
A cloud security architect should consider the different cloud service models when helping you design a cloud security strategy.
What is the shared responsibility model?
The goal of this model is to describe the roles of cloud consumers and service providers. Cloud service providers are generally in charge of the back-end infrastructure, but this can vary based on the sort of relationship you have with your service provider, such as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, or even the product, such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. You can read more about the shared responsibility model here.
Apart from models like these, there are organizations that have been formed to ensure that security becomes an irrevocable part of the cloud ecosystem. Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to securing cloud computing practices and educating people on how to achieve them. Learn more about the Cloud Security Alliance here.
What is cloud security architecture?
Cloud security architecture is the blueprint of your cloud infrastructure. A cloud environment is considered secure when it adheres to the CIA triad, which means:
- Confidentiality: Sensitive data is secure against unauthorized access.
- Integrity: Data remains unmodified by threat actors.
- Availability: Data and resources are always accessible to users in need.
The aim of constructing an effective cloud architecture is to increase security and trust and reduce the gap between the needs of the customers and the services provided by cloud service providers.
A cloud security architecture comprises two components: the front end and the back end. The front end refers to anything a consumer sees, such as the user interface, client-side apps, or client devices. The back end refers to the portion of the cloud the cloud service provider is accountable for. This may include data storage, virtual machines, security mechanisms, services, deployment models, CPU, GPU, security, and management. The front end and back end are linked via the network or middleware.
Although having a strong cloud security architecture is important, knowing potential threats to the cloud is just as important. Let's discuss the multitude of new dangers and weaknesses that cloud environments have to cope with.
Security challenges of the cloud
It goes without saying that the cloud has its own security downfalls. Some of these are:
- Third-party risks: Since most organizations use a third-party service for their cloud requirements, they'll often face three unfavorable situations. First, vendor lock-ins, where users are forced to stick to a particular service provider because switching costs are too high. Second, unsecure third-party resources. Third, most organizations rely on more than one cloud provider. This means different types of control protocols and change management, which can lead to misconfigurations and a poorly secured cloud infrastructure.
- Human-caused risks: According to Infosecurity Magazine, almost 55% of cloud security breaches happen due to human error, especially from misconfigurations. Apart from this, another cause of concern is insider threats—people within the organization, such as current or former employees and stakeholders, who have access privileges. If not monitored properly, such access privileges can hurt the organization. Using a solution with user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) capabilities can help organizations stay ahead of human-caused threats.
- Access concerns: Ineffective identity and access management is one of the most common problems in cloud computing environments. Maintenance problems, weak password security, identity management, unauthorized access across cloud environments, and compliance are a few of these difficulties. Often, a byproduct of unwanted accesses at open ports is account hijacking, which is yet another challenge prevalent in cloud-based services.
- APIs and interfaces: Cloud services frequently come with APIs and other interfaces to ensure smooth data flow in order to address these problems. In spite of all the precautions, securing APIs (including shadow APIs and API parameters) and interfaces remains an important challenge for cloud computing. Poor attack surface management can lead to zero-day attacks and data loss.
- Insufficient human resources: The cloud computing industry faces a lack of experts. It needs more people who can help create strategies to fortify cloud security, especially for multi-cloud infrastructures.
- Cloud malware: Attacks like DDoS, cloud malware injection, and hyperjacking can lead to data loss or even a complete takeover of the environment. Cloud infrastructures are primarily dominated by Linux-based machines, owing to advantages such as lower costs, reliability, and flexibility. If you're considering using Azure for your cloud needs, here are some essential tips you should know to defend your Linux systems.
- Compliance challenges: Staying compliant can often be challenging considering the number of processes and tests involved. However, the perks of staying compliant are higher than the consequences of noncompliance.
Here are a few cloud security best practices you can follow to secure your cloud: 14 best practices to secure your cloud environment.
Securing the cloud in healthcare, finance, and education sectors
Are you tired of all the generic cloud information out there? Do you want to know how the cloud works for your industry, including the potential dangers, compliance concerns, or best practices you need to follow?
Get the answers to all your cloud-related questions for three major sectors: healthcare, banking and finance, and education. Plus, learn our best tips for enterprise-grade organizations.
Cloud security in healthcare
- Data targeted by threat actors : ePHI, PII, and other documents that may contain medical records or patient reports.
- Potential dangers : Critical patient health information becoming inaccessible, increased mortality rates due to delayed care,data exposure over the dark web, and overall business interruption and reputation damage.
- Compliance concerns :Noncompliance to HIPAA or other healthcare mandates can lead to heavy penalties.
Cloud security in banking and finance
- Data targeted by threat actors : Financial information, social security information, and data containing hashes of passwords to financial accounts.
- Potential dangers : Transaction interruptions, financial theft, data theft, and data exposure over the dark web. These can lead to economic collapses in severe cases.
- Compliance concerns : Noncompliance to mandates like the PCI DSS, FISMA, and SOX can lead to heavy fines.
Cloud security in education
- Data targeted by threat actors : Student personal information, scholarship information, and financial information.
- Potential dangers : Academic records of students can be tampered with, compromising future educational or career opportunities.
- Compliance concerns :Noncompliance tomandates such as FERPA, governing educational sectors will result in hefty penalties.
Cloud security in enterprises
Large enterprises face greater challenges when securing their cloud environments. Here are some practices that can make enterprise-grade cloud security easier and more effective:
- Develop clear cloud security objectives that align with your business goals.Assign clear roles and responsibilities within SOC teams on who handles what aspects of security.
- Implement effective access controls through MFA, follow the principle of least privilege, and perform periodic threat hunting exercises.
- Invest in solutions that monitor behavioral activity, protect data across its lifecycle, and provide response automation features.
- Choose a reliable cloud security provider,working with them to understand what security controls and protective measures they'llestablish to secure your data.
To understand the impact of cloud adoption and the evolution of cloud security, ManageEngine conducted a survey in association with Censuswide. You can read it here.
How to protect your cloud environment with Log360
Log360 is a comprehensive SIEM solution with CASB capabilities offering comprehensive protection for cloud environments. It securely aggregates logs from critical devices, performs security audits, sets priority-based alerts, builds rule-based alerts for known attacks, performs high-speed searches using SQL-based queries, manages incidents, meets regulatory mandates like the PCI DSS, FISMA, GLBA, SOX, HIPAA, and ISO/IEC 27001. It also provides a fully configured threat intelligence module that automatically updates threat data from trusted sources.
