Cloud computing security, also known as cloud security, refers to the policies, technology, and controls used to protect data, applications, services, and cloud computing infrastructure.
Cloud security includes protecting:
- Public clouds
- Private clouds and SDNs
- Hybrid clouds
How to maintain data security in cloud computing
Cloud network security is complicated by the diverse maze of network connectivity in on-premises data centers and cloud centers. Organizations need to ensure that security is maintained across cloud-only and hybrid networks.
While using cloud systems that adhere to compliance rules and maintaining cloud compliance is an important step to strengthen your security posture, it is a minimum requirement. However, in the shared responsibility model, while part of your security is handed over to third party cloud providers, part of it also relies with the cloud customer. Cloud complexity can lead to data leakage and data theft.
The cloud has multiple layers of security controls. One of the potential risks of a data leak in the cloud is monitoring the traffic flows across your multi-cloud and hybrid network. For example, you may have multiple AWS and Azure instances, but their native management consoles don’t provide cross-platform visibility.
Mitigating the risks of cloud computing
There are several steps to mitigate cloud computing risks. With a unified view of your multi-cloud network, there is greater visibility into the traffic flows over complex security controls. Greater visibility also consists of unified management over your cloud firewalls, such as Azure firewalls, and on-premises devices to minimize misconfigurations.
In addition, staff training helps to mitigate the risk as there are frequently multiple stakeholders managing cloud deployment, with increased risk of ‘shadow IT’ in the cloud. Some organizations even have different staff concerned with cloud security than on-premises security.
How AlgoSec helps with cloud computing security
AlgoSec CloudFlow helps you improve your cloud computing security by solving the multi-cloud security management challenge.
AlgoSec CloudFlow provides:
- Continuous Visibility – CloudFlow provides holistic visibility for all of your cloud accounts assets and security controls.
- Risk management – Proactively detect misconfigurations to protect cloud assets, including cloud instances, databases, and serverless functions. Identify risky rules and their last usage date to gain the comfort to remove them so that you can avoid data breaches and improve your overall security posture.
- Central management of security policies – Manage network security controls, such as security groups and Azure Firewalls, in one system across multiple clouds, accounts, regions and VPC/VNETs. Manage similar security controls in a single security policy so you can save time and prevent misconfigurations.
- Policy cleanup – As cloud security groups are constantly adjusted, they can rapidly bloat. This makes it difficult to maintain, increasing potential risk. With CloudFlow’s advanced rule cleanup capabilities, you can easily identify unused rules and remove them with confidence.
Relevant Resources
CSA Study: Security Challenges in Cloud Environments
Cloud computing provides improved security, agility, and flexibility. However, integrating this new service into legacy IT environments comes with great concern.
