Cloud Security and Privacy: Best Practices to Mitigate the Risks

Cloud security refers to technologies, best practices, and safety guidelines that help to protect your data from human errors, insider and security threats. Therefore, it naturally covers a wide range of procedures, which are aimed at securing systems from data breaches, data loss, unauthorized access, and other cybersecurity-related risks that are growing from year to year. 

According to GitProtect's State of DevOps Threats report, the number of incidents in GitHub grew by over 20%, and around 32% of events in GitLab had an impact on service performance and customers. Moreover, it’s worth mentioning that the cost of failures is growing as well. Thus, the average cost of recovering from a ransomware attack is around $2.73 million, the average cost of a data breach is $4.88 million, and every minute of downtime can cost up to $ 9 K. 

To prepare itself for any threats and risks in the cloud, and learn to mitigate them, companies should first understand what cloud security and privacy measures are. 

Cloud Services and Environments — Let’s Break Down the Types  

Before we jump to cloud security, we need to understand the basics, because cloud components are usually secured from two main viewpoints: cloud service types and cloud environments. 

Let’s start with cloud services that providers use as modules for creating cloud environments. Well, cloud services can be provided in a range of ways, each with its own security concerns specific to distinct areas of IT infrastructure and application administration. 

Thus, you can find:

Then, we have different cloud environments or, so to speak, deployment models. Why is it important to understand the difference between them? Like cloud service types, the cloud environments help get a better understanding of responsibilities between service providers and their customers:

• Public clouds, which are run on a shared infrastructure supplied by third-party cloud service providers. This brings security concerns as the resources are shared, so you will need to implement strong access controls, encryption, and constant monitoring to protect your data and applications.
• Private clouds are specialized environments for a specific enterprise that provide increased protection and data management. They successfully mitigate internal and external threats by implementing strict access controls, network segmentation, and encryption.
• Hybrid clouds, which make use of both public and private cloud environments. This way, you get smooth data and application mobility while still maintaining flexibility and security. For sensitive applications, this architecture could use on-premises infrastructure and rely on the public cloud for better scalability and cost savings. Some of the considerations in terms of security in a hybrid cloud include: enforcing consistent security rules across environments, encrypting data in transit and at rest, and maintaining a reliable network connection.
• Multi-clouds, which require using services from different cloud providers to prevent things like vendor lock-ins and to benefit from the best possible solutions out there. However, taking care of complex security measures and guaranteeing interoperability across cloud platforms (different cloud services and solutions that work together seamlessly) could be challenging. To stay protected across several cloud environments, successful multi-cloud security methods require some sort of centralized security administration, robust authentication systems, and regular audits.

Benefits of Cloud Security 

Strong cloud data security and privacy measures have several benefits that help businesses protect their data and maximize operational effectiveness. Among them, we can mention:

• Lower costs as you don’t need to pay for dedicated hardware
• Improved reliability and availability as cloud services should ensure the accessibility of its services (to achieve this, they should have constant security monitoring)
• Application security, as cloud providers regularly perform security testing and other secure development practices to minimize the risk of vulnerabilities in their own infrastructure
• Customer support to help the users deal with issues 24/7
• Access control and identity management to help organizations authenticate only authorized users
• Compliance with industry standards such as ISO 27001, SOC, GDPR, HIPAA, and others relevant to the industry – it’s the service provider’s obligation to undergo strict security audits and certifications to assure that their service is secure
• Updates and innovations, as service providers constantly develop their products to make them better and more secure for their users

Why Cloud Security Is Important — Let’s Face the Challenges

Cloud security is rather important to maintain customer trust, prevent cybersecurity-related issues from affecting your business, and to stay compliant with regulatory industry standards. 

The Shared Responsibility Models

Moreover, we should clearly understand that cloud service providers operate under the shared responsibility model, which defines the roles and responsibilities of both parties, the provider and its customers.

To make a long story short, a cloud service provider is responsible for its service availability and security, and a customer is responsible for their account data.

Thus, if you accidentally deleted your data or your data is corrupted, a service provider isn’t responsible for restoring your data. Your account data is your responsibility! And if you think that nothing fails in the cloud, think again. There are documented outages, human error cases, cyberattacks, etc., which are potential threats to your business. That is why it is important to understand what your obligations are in terms of data protection and how to build your data protection strategy in the cloud. 

Keep Up With Compliance Regulations 

To be compliant in terms of cloud security means to follow the legal guidelines, data privacy regulations, and overall data protection standards. This especially applies to companies in highly regulated industries, like healthcare, energy, finance, etc. 

To become compliant with straightened security protocols, organizations should carefully evaluate cloud service providers – preferably, those cloud providers should be compliant with security regulations, like SOC 2, GDPR, ISO 27001, etc.

Best Practices for Cloud Security and Privacy 

Let’s move on to the most important aspects of cloud security. So, how can you strengthen your cyber defenses and take some of the stress off your shoulders?

1. Stay Up to Date With Patching 

Outdated systems, security processes, or configurations can be exploited by hackers and put your organization at risk of data loss. Therefore, it is critical to stay up to date with the most recent and relevant security updates and upgrade your cloud infrastructure or systems accordingly. 

2. Assess the Risks 

It is important to thoroughly analyze any risks and vulnerabilities concerning your cloud data. By having a clear outline of these threats, your organization can prioritize them properly and deal with them effectively in a timely manner. 

3. Encrypt Your Data 

A key factor in keeping your cloud data protected is encryption. It should be applied at both levels — at rest and in transit. It will help to ensure that even if data is stolen, it is unreadable without the decryption key.

4. Have Constant Monitoring and Auditing 

You should constantly monitor your network. Keep track of all the devices that are interconnected, if anyone tries to gain unauthorized access, or if any attempts to alter data are made. You can do this manually or use monitoring software solutions. You should set up alerts to notify you of unauthorized access and any new devices connecting to your network. Monitoring helps you detect potential threats earlier and deal with them, leading to better data security. 

5. Implement a Zero-Trust Model

For maximum security, you should adopt a zero-trust model. That means zero trust for individuals inside and outside your organization. This way, you stay protected from malicious insiders within your organization, old employees who were fired, as well as hackers. Main practices would include strong access controls, authentication mechanisms, and sticking to the least privilege principle. 

6. Manage Access Controls 

Another key element of strong data protection is having clearly defined and effective access controls. Lay out what kind of access your team members will need in order to complete their tasks, and then limit everyone’s access according to their job. 

7. Adopt Secure Passwords and MFA 

Multiple factor authentication (MFA) mechanisms are key because a password and the authentication of the user on the other side of the screen are one of your first lines of defense. If passwords throughout your organization are simple 8-character phrases, it is too weak; a hacker can break this kind of password in 37 seconds. Therefore, you should educate your staff about having strong passwords, implement MFA mechanisms, and apply policies for the kinds of passwords to use (length, numbers, special signs, etc.). 

8. Use Antivirus Software and Firewalls 

An antivirus is software that identifies and gets rid of any malware on a device, and a firewall is a mechanism that stops any unauthorized access to and from your system or network. These help to guard against cyber threats like malware, ransomware, or hackers trying to access your data in general. Firewalls monitor incoming and outgoing network traffic through predefined security rules and have the ability to block or allow data packets. 

9. Educate Your Team 

In order for safety procedures to be effective, your team must clearly understand them. Make sure that everyone knows their roles and responsibilities, what potential risks are out there that could affect your organization, and encourage employees to report any potential suspicious security threats. 

10. Make Backup Copies of Your Data 

A backup and DR solution will help ensure that you never worry about losing your data. When you search for a backup option, make sure that it adheres to the 3-2-1 backup rule, encrypt your data both at rest and in transit (it’s nice if you can use your own encryption key!). cover all of the data — both repositories and metadata, allow you to schedule and automate backups as well as give you the ability to perform granular restores, point-in-time restores, and incremental backups. 

For compliance or archiving purposes, unlimited retention may come in handy too. All these features will help you to recover your data in no time in case of a disaster scenario, such as accidental or intentional deletion of important data, ransomware, as well as platform outages (you can just access your backups, switch to another platform, and continue working from there). 

Make Sure That Your Cloud Provider’s DC Is Safe

When you choose a cloud provider, it’s important to make sure that it stores your data in a secure data center. Make sure that your cloud services data center has guaranteed physical security, undergoes regular audits, and has fire protection and technical support in place. 

These data centers are also should be compliant with industry security standards such as ISO 27001, EN 1047-2 standard, SOC 2 Type 2, EN 50600, SOC 3, FISMA, DCID, DOD, HIPAA, ISO 50001, PCI-DSS Level 1 and PCI DSS, LEED Gold Certificate, and SSAE 16. All these measures are important if you decide to go through auditing to become compliant.

Have Compliance Checks 

Regular compliance checks and auditing are important to make sure that your organization keeps adhering to the security standards and regulations. By doing so, you boost the security of your company’s data and support business continuity. Auditing is also important for transparency and compliance with security standards like HIPAA, GDPR, ISO, or SOC. 

Takeaway 

To sum up, cloud security is important to stay protected against threats of human error, outages, and cybersecurity threats. Moreover, adhering to the shared responsibility model under which most VCS platforms operate is also important for the security of your data. We had a look at how you can benefit from backup and disaster recovery solutions in terms of the shared responsibility model and outlined the duties of each party in cloud data protection. 

The SaaS provider is responsible for the uptime and security of their own infrastructure, but your data is your own responsibility. Cloud services such as GitHub and GitLab have no obligation to help you restore your data if it gets deleted, stolen, or corrupted. That is why it is important to have appropriate security measures, such as backup and DR strategies, in your cyber defenses to stay compliant with the shared responsibility model and keep your data safe.