Remaining secure throughout the Cloud lifecycle
For organizations around the world, cloud-based services have become an enabler for an efficient, agile and flexible IT model that delivers significant cost savings. However, despite the benefits cloud services offer, there are few long-established organizations that have yet managed to switch 100% to the Cloud, which is due to their massive investment in on-premise infrastructure.
While new start-ups are fortunate to be able to source all their services from the Cloud right from the beginning, for established organisations still needing to work with mission-critical legacy IT, a manageable hybrid IT approach is needed that mixes cloud-based services with traditional existing IT. For these organizations, the challenge is bolting all elements together with consistent security throughout.
The complexity of Cloud security
Today, organizations tend to buy in multiple cloud services from multiple vendors, and not all have high-level security built-in. In addition, while some private mission-critical cloud services might have high-level security, combining these different services with different protocols, makes the overall security situation highly complex and much harder to effectively orchestrate and manage. In the complicated IT landscape created, intelligence and insight are the only ways to combat sophisticated cyber security threats.
Maintaining Cloud security
A robust security regime requires constant monitoring to detect, assess, and mitigate problems, however, with cloud-based services you don’t own all the processes. It’s this lack of ownership and control that makes monitoring everything difficult and detection and issue mitigation a challenge.
Covering the whole Cloud lifecycle is the only way to combat security threats, however, the ability to predict, detect, respond to, and protect against cyber threats will very much depend on your choice of cloud-based service. By choosing carefully and utilizing cloud services with appropriate security built-in, you’ll not only be protected from attack, you can even learn new security techniques, such as; encryption, data loss prevention and smart automated monitoring of apps/data, that you can apply to your legacy services.
What to consider when looking for cloud-based services:
- do the Cloud provider’s controls meet your specific compliance obligations
- how are physical security controls addressed
- general governance, risk and compliance controls
- standards and certifications
- data residency and data separation
- audit and operational security options
- integrated user management and access controls
- defined SLAs and clear accountability
What does all this mean for your organization?
While some organizations still view cloud services as a risk to IT security, in reality, it's only a risk if you select cloud services that don’t have an appropriate level of security built-in. You can take advantage of the benefits more flexible IT brings without opening yourself up to attack. By undertaking a risk assessment before you buy, you can ensure that you choose the right service with the most appropriate security built-in right from the start.
By choosing to implement cloud services with heightened levels of protection, you can use what you learn and apply the same kind of protection to your on-premises IT infrastructure. With Cloud, you could eradicate erratic security and set new standards across your entire hybrid IT estate.
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