The cloud is the place to be right now for many business owners who have had to pivot operations online. Thousands of businesses with millions of employees have made the transition to cloud-based solutions. And that means you have to know what your top concerns are, to ensure you are protecting your assets with the best cybersecurity solutions.
Let’s discuss some of the top cloud security priorities you should be thinking about today and in the future.
Incident Preparation
With hundreds of reports all saying that cyberattacks of all varieties are on the rise, especially malware-based attacks that include ransomware, cryptojacking, hyperjacking, DDoS, live migration exploitation, and more. In fact, total malware infections have risen by 800 million from 2009 to 2018, and it’s even higher than that today.
Creating solutions and protocols that will be the blueprints of your cyber threat responses is crucial to maintaining the digital health of your business and its data.
Emergency preparedness drills that you run periodically to remind your employees and management what to do in the event of a fire, tornado, or other natural or man-made disasters. But the rate at which cybercrime grows and evolves means it’s not a “just in case” exercise like this. You are preparing for an attack that is more than a statistical possibility, it’s almost a statistical certainty.
Your cloud priorities must start with the plans you’ll need in place to combat whatever cyberattacks are aimed at your business and industry.
Cloud Access Control
We’ve all seen the stories online about how a former employee was still able to access documents on a company’s cloud or network even after they no longer worked there. As tiring as it is, monitoring and allocating data and cloud access accurately is one of the best ways to mitigate cyberattacks. Human error is the number one cause of cybersecurity breaches and is present in about 90% of data breaches.
Here are some things to think about when designating cloud access and control for employees:
- What data is being transferred and stored in the cloud, and how many teams interact with the same data files?
- Are there employees whose duties have changed, thus facilitating a change in access? Are there access items that can be revoked because they will no longer be using them?
- What layers of security are present for different data, based on the sensitivity of the data and its uses?
IT Service Transparency
This cloud priority is important if you have in-house IT professionals. It’s even more important if you employ a third-party provider to monitor your networks and cloud connections. When you are working with your IT service provider and going over cloud security priorities, do you feel there is a suitable level of transparency in the interactions?
Are issues, breaches, and cyberattack attempts reported in a timely and up-front manner? Does your representative or technician take the time to answer questions and address concerns that you or your teams bring to them?
The effectiveness of your outsourced IT program is dependent upon the skill set of the team you’ve employed as well as the methods they use to communicate important information to your in-house teams.
Integration & Automation
Cloud integration occurs when you connect your systems of tools and technologies that are being used in your business operations to your apps, systems, and IT assets and environments.
The purpose of this integration is to allow for the real-time exchange of data.
Cloud automation creates solutions that allow you to have complete, continuous visibility across your cloud services. This helps in the development, staging, production, and monitoring of your data and top cloud priorities.
Cloud solutions now move at such a fast speed that manual solutions can’t keep up. When it comes to cloud security, efficiency is key. You want your security solutions to be able to run the necessary protection programs on their own and to alert you – or your IT partner at CyberFort Advisors – as soon as there is a problem or error.
CyberFort Advisors – Here to Tackle Your Top Cloud Security Priorities While You Focus on Your Business Priorities
CyberFort Advisors has a wide array of services including data security, full protection network monitoring and security, and email and web security.
No matter how much of your business is in the cloud, CyberFort is here to create tailored services that are optimized to protect your digital assets.
Contact us today to get a network threat assessment.