Cloud data security best practices

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As organizations increasingly migrate data to the cloud for scalability, security remains a critical concern. Especially since, according to a 2022 survey on cloud storage trends, the majority of surveyed organizations (67%) are already hosting sensitive data in public cloud instances. Relying solely on your cloud service provider (CSP) for security is insufficient and could expose you to security breaches. Your responsibility in protecting critical data from security incidents starts with having a clear understanding of what to secure and extends to maintaining a sturdy cloud security posture. To mitigate risks effectively, here are eight best practices to follow.

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8 best practices for securing data in the cloud

 

Understand your shared responsibilities

  • Securing your data in the cloud requires working in tandem with your CSP. This involves understanding and defining a shared responsibility model that outlines how security responsibilities are divided between your organization and it's CSP
  • Depending on the cloud service model and provider, your security responsibilities could vary. Here's how AWS divides security responsibilities as per its shared responsibility model.
 

Discover and classify sensitive data in the cloud

  • Define what constitutes as sensitive data for your organization, such as PII, PCI, and ePHI, and perform data discovery across your cloud storage environments.
  • Classify data into different categories like internal, public, sensitive, and restricted based on its level of sensitivity.
 

Employ MFA

  • Enforce robust password policies by mandating password complexity and rotation while prohibiting reuse as an extra layer of security.
  • Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) to supplement passwords and prevent potential unauthorized access to data, particularly through brute-force attacks.
 

Implement strong access controls

  • Assign user privileges to data and cloud resources based on the principle of least privilege (PoLP).
  • Adopt an identity and access management solution that enforces role-based and attribute-based access controls to fine-tune permissions based on user roles and attributes.
 

Encrypt data at rest and in transit

  • Protect data at rest from unauthorized access by applying strong encryption algorithms such as AES-256 or elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) protocols.
  • Encrypt data in transit using the latest and most secure SSL/TLS protocols to protect it from interception, theft, and manipulation.
  • Utilize hardware security models (HSMs) to store cryptographic keys and perform cryptographic functions.
 

Monitor and regulate cloud activity continuously

  • Deploy Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) to sanction business relevant cloud applications, discover the usage of shadow apps, and block unsafe applications.
  • Use DLP tools to discover sensitive data, identify the applications in which it resides, and prevent it from being uploaded to illegitimate applications.
 

Review your cloud security posture

  • Conduct penetration tests periodically to identify vulnerabilities and assess the efficacy of your defenses, including intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS) and firewalls, in tackling incidents.
  • Leverage compliance auditing tools to verify your network against regulations and keep you informed of any violations and how they could be negatively impacting your overall security posture.
 

Effectively respond to incidents

  • Detect cloud security incidents by reviewing access logs and analyzing user behavior.
  • Isolate compromised systems to halt malware from proliferating through lateral movement.
  • Maintain secure backups to recover from an incident and avoid data loss.

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