Cloud Data Security Definition

What is Cloud Data Security?

Cloud data security is the measures and practices organizations or individuals take to protect information stored, processed, and transmitted in the cloud. Cloud security involves implementing security controls and mechanisms to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA) of cloud data.

The Data Security Risk of the Cloud

Companies are increasingly moving data and applications to cloud environments. The cloud offers inexpensive storage and greater scalability and availability than most organizations can achieve in an on-prem data center.

However, security incidents are common in the cloud for a variety of different factors. The unique nature of cloud infrastructure — where cloud customers can only access and manage a portion of their cloud infrastructure stack — means that traditional security models and tools are ineffective. Also, cloud environments are more accessible and easy to use — both for cloud customers and attackers — increasing their risk of exploitation.

Cloud Data Security Best Practices

To manage the data security risks of the cloud, an organization can implement various cloud security controls. Some cloud data security best practices include:

• Data Encryption: Cloud environments are accessible from the public Internet and hosted on shared infrastructure. Encrypting data in the cloud — both at rest and in transit — helps to protect cloud data against unauthorized access.
• Configuration Management: Security misconfigurations are a common security issue that leads to breaches in the cloud. Monitoring and managing cloud settings for insecure configurations is an important part of cloud data security.
• Strong Authentication: Cloud environments are publicly accessible, making them easy for an attacker to access with compromised credentials. Implementing strong authentication — ideally using multi-factor authentication (MFA) — is important for limiting the risk that an attacker can gain access to user cloud accounts and data.
• Access Controls: Often, cloud users are granted excessive permissions, creating significant risk to the organization if their accounts are misused or compromised by an attacker. Cloud user accounts should be defined using the principle of least privilege, which states that users should only have the permissions needed to do their jobs.
• Data Backups: Data loss can be caused by various threats, such as ransomware attacks or destructive malware. Data backups can help to ensure that an organization can rapidly restore data after a security incident.
• Data Loss Prevention (DLP): Cloud environments are designed to be highly usable, making it easy for employees to set up their own environments. DLP solutions help to ensure that employees can’t move company data to personally-owned, potentially insecure cloud environments.
• Monitoring and Management: Cloud environments should be constantly monitored like the rest of an organization’s infrastructure. This helps to ensure that the organization can detect and remediate security incidents in the cloud.
• Security Testing: Cloud environments should undergo regular security testing to identify potential vulnerabilities. This includes both automated vulnerability scanning and periodic penetration tests.

Conclusion

Cloud environments are entrusted with a growing amount of sensitive customer and business data. Implementing strong access and security controls in the cloud is essential to protecting this data against unauthorized access and attack.