What is Cloud Security?
Cloud security refers to the application of cybersecurity standards and compliance to data that’s stored in the cloud or processed via cloud-hosted providers.
“The cloud” is a term that refers to a number of different kinds of storage solutions and processing environments. Most people are referring to Public Clouds — or shared environments that any number of people or businesses might pay to access.
However, there are also Private Clouds — with the high level of uptime and bandwidth associated with public clouds, but where access is limited to a particular enterprise or entity.
Finally, there are also Hybrid Clouds, which is where businesses are running on a variety of environments, some are public or private cloud, while others are on-premises or local servers.
Cloud Security Challenges
Obviously, each of these cloud configurations presents different cybersecurity challenges. That’s why the Cloud Security Alliance has created a set of standards for potential customers to assess the security postures of third-party providers objectively.
Because of the complexity of the environments, and the ever-changing landscape of cloud processes that a business may use, it’s difficult to estimate an enterprise’s level of cyber exposure at any given time.
There’s often little to no tracking or visibility into cloud solutions, and there’s a large amount of reliance upon automation to help mitigate security risks. Real-time threat detection and remediation are integrations offered by cloud services (such as Google or Amazon Web Services) to help with this.
Data protection, identity and access management, and data encryption are all important parts of cloud security solutions. One best practice is to isolate certain networks and environments to control access and prevent exposure.
