Today's defensive teams must devise new techniques for a hybrid and multi-cloud world. Multi-vendor and hybrid cloud security issues can arise. Cloud deployments increase IT complexity while reducing physical management demands. This is difficult for security staff, who regularly lose sight of the bigger picture. Trying to avoid vendor lock-in can result in a deluge of data from numerous platforms and SaaS apps. These can be housed in various, poorly linked data silos, making efficient monitoring and incident response operations challenging. Other cloud security issues stem from complex data that is difficult to control.
Using numerous cloud providers' architecture and service delivery models makes maintaining consistent data protection requirements challenging. The quick speed of change in a public cloud merely exacerbates the issue. PCPs frequently change their services to make it difficult for clients to switch platforms. So staying on top of the prospective problems becomes increasingly tricky. Insecure teams that monitor threats, risk detection, and workflow coordination can never effectively secure cloud environments. What may appear to be cost-saving techniques may not be if they cause errors or incorrect exposure of cloud resources.
Cloud Security Best Practices
1. Misconfiguration is still a significant factor in most cloud data breaches. Most data breaches recorded in 2019 were due to misconfigurations, and all were due to human error. The majority of teams involved were unaware they were in charge of resolving the issue. In other circumstances, they lacked auditing tools.
Investing in IT operations people and educating defensive teams on the cloud is critical. These tools can monitor for typical misconfigurations, including storage bucket hazards.
2. Default Encryption
Encryption of cloud data at rest is enabled. Encryption does not guard against breaches per se, but it adds another degree of protection against data compromise. This is a little precaution, but it is critical in multi-vendor cloud defence. Automated tools can help determine whether or not encryption is enabled for each cloud storage bucket.
3. Maintain IAM controls
Maintain IAM solutions carefully to address frequent cloud security issues. Cloud and hybrid setups are vulnerable to credential compromise, and these attacks are notoriously hard to detect. Local IAM solutions rarely perform effectively in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, and LDAP-based IAM solutions, for example, show promise in hybrid environments.
4. Monitoring is critical for hybrid and cloud security.
Cloud-based security operations processes and workflows must adapt. It's vital to help staff manage cloud security issues and improve their abilities.
Adopting automated methods to gather and manage the enormous volumes of log data generated by cloud platforms will be critical. Most open-source SOAR platforms can work with many vendors' tools and cloud providers' platforms. Artificial intelligence and machine learning can help minimise alert volume by filtering data.
5. Weigh the Pros and Cons
Consider trade-offs while creating a multi-vendor cloud strategy. Multicloud has its benefits and drawbacks. The main advantages of choosing services and platforms from various PCPs are cost savings and the ability to optimise application performance.
Conversely, you may construct a workflow with significant skill gaps. These typically occur while moving data between systems or managing security throughout the ecosystem.
Pick the Best Cloud Security Roadmap for You
So how do you determine the best method to cloud security? Consider a framework and standard-based approach. Then choose services that fit within this ecosystem. This may increase service costs initially but save time and money in the long run. You can have a secure cloud environment that is easy to design, operate, and maintain with a comprehensive hybrid and multi-vendor cloud security approach.