Embracing Cloud Without Compromising Security

Among cyber-security experts, 2021 will be remembered as the year that cloud breaches surpassed on-premises breaches for the first time. 

In many respects, that is not surprising. The pandemic has been a catalyst for many organisations to transition to cloud-computing. As ever, cyber-criminals are quick to adapt whenever they sense a new opportunity. As a result, many cyber-criminals have begun focusing their efforts on breaching cloud environments.

According to Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report , 73 percent of cyber-security incidents now involve cloud assets, with the rest involving on-premises IT assets. The previous year, cloud only accounted for 27 percent of breaches.

It’s clear that transitioning to the cloud offers organisations many benefits. However, it may also present significant risks when not planned and executed correctly.

In this blog, we will explore the benefits of cloud, some of the important security implications you need to consider before transitioning, and how expert guidance can help you avoid potentially devastating breaches.

Four Benefits of Embracing a Cloud Computing

All the talk in recent years has been on the need for organisations to migrate to the cloud. It’s a trend that has grown exponentially through the pandemic, as organisations adapt to find ways to enable staff to work remotely, as well as opportunities to transact digitally with customers.
The benefits of cloud computing are numerous. Below are four key benefits many organisations experience when embracing cloud computing:

1. Pursue new opportunities

Migrating to the cloud allows you to pursue new business opportunities. Utilising cloud data centres offers levels of flexibility and scalability that could not easily be achieved with on-premises technologies. This ensures your organisation can expand its computing resources efficiently as circumstances change, and your needs evolve. It allows you to collect and store more data, which in turn offers the potential for greater insights and new commercial opportunities. By harnessing the strengths of cloud computing, your organisation can turbo-charge growth by engaging more customers irrespective of geographic location, as well as fostering deeper engagement with existing customers.

2. Facilitate remote work

Rolling pandemic-induced lockdowns have been a major driving force behind many organisations embracing cloud computing. Many have found transitioning to the cloud essential to maintaining staff connectivity. By enabling staff to access the systems and applications required to carry out their work duties from multiple devices, many organisations have been able to maintain business operations despite the many disruptions caused by the pandemic.

3. Reduce Costs

Cloud technologies allow you to reduce both upfront and ongoing costs compared to expensive on-premises systems. Investing in on-premises physical data centres, as well as all the associated IT staff required to set-up and maintain them, can be prohibitively expensive for many organisations. All too often, organisations find themselves investing in systems with excess capacity. This is hardly the best use of limited resources. Cloud solutions allow you to achieve economies of scale by sharing cloud computing resources with other organisations. You also benefit by having access to the cloud provider’s team of experts. All these factors can help make cloud systems more cost effective than on-premises systems. Rather than large upfront costs, not to mention ongoing maintenance costs, embracing cloud allows you to simply pay predictable monthly fees. Generally, the fees would only increase if and when you need additional capacity due to business growth.

4. Business Continuity

Cloud technology can strengthen your ability to recover from a range of disasters and enable you to maintain business continuity in the face of potential disruptions. With cloud infrastructure often located in multiple physical locations, many cloud providers offer network availability guarantees. Cloud solutions can be scaled rapidly in accordance with changing usage and demand, further mitigating the risks of interruption or downtime. Cloud providers also have access to cyber-security systems and expertise that many individual organisations lack. This can reduce the risk that your data may be comprised as a result of a data breach.

Key Security Considerations When Selecting a Cloud Provider

Despite a range of security benefits that come from cloud computing, it is clear that cloud environments can also be breached, with potentially devastating consequences.

Whilst cloud providers bear some responsibility for security, other security considerations remain the responsibility of the individual cloud tenants. This shared responsibility model may require a cloud provider to ensure the data centre perimeter is secure, or that tenants on shared servers cannot access each other’s data. However, individual tenants usually retain primary responsibility for system configurations. Given that most cloud breaches start with configuration errors, any organisation transitioning to a cloud environment would be wrong to assume they no longer need to worry about security.    When considering different cloud providers, it is essential you undertake a comprehensive risk assessments. Some of the important questions you should consider before selecting a cloud provider include:

Reputation

When embarking on your cloud journey, it’s critical to remember one essential truth: You are handing over access to business-critical data to a third-party. That means there needs to be a very high degree of trust between your organisation and the cloud provider.
Undertake due diligence on any prospective cloud providers. Check their reputation to see who their other clients are and their level of cloud experience. The cloud provider should be able to demonstrate compliance with a range of security standards. They should also have formal risk management policies in place and processes for assessing third-party service providers and vendors. 
Any cloud provider should also take time to understand your organisation and the outcomes you are trying to achieve.

Data Transmission, Processing & Storage

Most attacks against cloud environments seek to compromise valuable sensitive data. Therefore, it is critical that your cloud provider has systems and processes in place to ensure your organisation’s data is transmitted, processed and stored securely.
Some organisations have data sovereignty requirements. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) should stipulate whether data is stored exclusively in onshore data centres. Your organisation may need to adhere to certain data security and privacy compliance standards, so it is important to verify that your cloud provider undertakes continuous monitoring and reporting for audit purposes.
Physical access controls should also be a priority that safeguard the data centre.

Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Capabilities

Cloud providers should have plans and expertise in place to allow a rapid response to any cyber incident. At a minimum, they should have comprehensive security policies and procedures in place for access control, as well as 24/7 eyes-on-glass monitoring of all logs and events in the environment to rapidly detect any potential cyber-security breaches.
All data should be backed-up and retained in order to avoid any permanent loss of business-critical data, ensuring that in the event of a breach, your organisation can recover rapidly from any disaster and maintain business continuity.
Ensure that recovery times and capabilities are stipulated in your SLAs.

Hybrid Solutions – Aligning On-Premises and Cloud Environments

Many organisations find that a hybrid solution, where they retain use of their on-premises systems for certain functions, whilst embracing public cloud computing for others, offers the best of both worlds.

In some circumstances, organisations may prefer to retain sensitive data and applications on-premises, behind their own firewalls. This ensures access is tightly restricted to individuals within the organisation. At the same time, the organisation may opt to embrace public cloud computing for other systems that are not quite as sensitive. This ensures the organisation can derive the many benefits of the cloud, such as the capacity to scale rapidly, greater flexibility, access to more expertise and reduced costs.   In many cases, on-premises systems will be connected to cloud-hosted systems. This poses a potential risk whereby malicious actors who gain access to an organisation’s on-premises systems are able to pivot to the cloud environment as part of an attack. It is critical that the right security architecture is adopted to limit the capacity of cyber-attackers to move laterally across your on-premises and cloud environments.

How can Threat Intelligence help your organisation embrace cloud securely?

Any organisation transitioning to cloud computing needs to understand that security considerations remain as important as in on-premises environments. With most cyber-incidents now occurring in cloud environments, and most of those stemming from configuration errors, expert guidance is essential to ensure your organisation’s security.

Hybrid models, which see an organisation transition partially to the cloud whilst retaining some on-premises capabilities, may present additional security challenges. 

Threat Intelligence offers expert guidance with comprehensive Security Architecture Reviews.  
The security architecture your organisation has in place is key to avoiding a major security breach. Ineffective security architecture covering your entire cloud and on-premises environments, puts your organisation at risk of compromise. The result could be that your organisation suffers a large-scale data breach with significant financial and reputational consequences. 
With a Security Architecture Review, you gain an understanding of your organisation’s systems and security controls. You will be able to identify areas of weakness that may be vulnerable to attack, with a comprehensive plan to uplift your organisation’s security maturity. Contact us today for a free consultation about our Security Architecture Review services.