With the current wave of digital development, most companies are already using cloud computing. Thus, it’s crucial to learn and understand the scope of cloud-based security and how it affects an organizations’ operational activities.
As companies move more data to the cloud, IT professionals are concerned about compliance, governance, and security since online content is vulnerable to malicious attacks.
No organization can risk its intellectual property being exposed due to cyber threats or accidental leaks. Hence, we’ve discussed cloud system security and the importance of secure cloud development in this article.
What Are the Four Areas of Cloud Security?
Secure cloud development is based on four pillars that provide foundational support to an organization’s online data preservation. Here are the four areas of cloud-based security:
Visibility and Compliance
A practical and secure cloud-based security system should give experts insight into the cloud environment, allowing room for improvement.
Most companies use the National Institute of Standards and Technology, ISO 27001, a security framework, to assess which controls are required to improve data security.
Compute-Based Security
In any cloud-based security system, the end systems should be secured. Compute-level security comes with two components.
- Automated Vulnerability Management: It prevents and identifies vulnerabilities in the application security.
- Operational Security: This component is ongoing and refers to anything associated with computing workload or engine.
Network Protections
Network protection is imperative not only for on-premises environments but also for the cloud. It has two main components:
- Microsegmentation: Zones are created to isolate workloads and ensure their individual security.
- Inline Traffic Flow: With this component, the security border is not extended around the cloud but for each user.
How Does Cloud Security Work?
Cloud-based security aims to minimize the risk of data loss or breaches in workplaces. It works through the following:
- Securing the Server: In the cloud, traffic does not go to the servers directly. Instead, it goes to the cloud. Thus, the cloud checks the traffic and only lets authorized and legitimate users through.
- Private Cloud: With cloud app security, organizations can create a private cloud isolating client applications. In this way, unwanted traffic is denied access to the private cloud.
- Data Filtering: Like traffic, information is also inspected and filtered by the cloud before the application system.
What Are the Types of Cloud Security Concerns?
IT experts and supply chain leaders face different types of cloud system security concerns. Some of them include:
- Data visibility and governance
- Data protection
- Fraud prevention
Third-party risks that external parties expose the organizations to
Since the cloud environment is quite large today, there’s an increased surface for attack. Thus, it gives hackers more room to exploit weakly secure cloud ports to disrupt workloads and access private information in the cloud.
Organizations need to enhance their data protection models by incorporating compliance risk management, encryption, and secure file sharing among different users.
Is Cloud Always Secure?
Although cloud-based security can be much tighter than traditional applications, it is not infallible.
In some cases, cybercriminals may access information by bypassing passwords or guessing the answers to security questions.
Therefore, any organization needs to have strong cloud-based security to keep their information private and safe from unauthorized individuals.
Why Is Supply Chain Security Important?
Supply chain security should be one of the topmost properties for organizations since a breach of this data could disrupt operations.
If there are vulnerabilities in the supply chain, an organization has to suffer inefficient delivery routines, unnecessary costs, and loss of intellectual data.
On top of that, they might end up delivering damaged or unauthorized products to customers that can bring forth lawsuits and significant economic losses in the future.
How Do You Secure a Supply Chain?
Securing the supply chain is not a single-department task. Marshal Lamb, the CTO at IBM Sterling, says, “Supply chain security is a multi-disciplinary problem and requires close collaboration and execution between the business, customer support, and IT organizations, which has its own challenges. The companies that get this right start with IT and a secure multi-enterprise business network, then build upward with carefully governed and secured access to analytics and visibility capabilities and, from there, continuously monitor every layer for anomalous behavior”*.
Here are some practices to ensure strong supply-chain security:
- Security strategy assessment to analyze compliance and evaluation of security governance, such as third-party risk and data privacy
- Penetration destiny and running vulnerability scans
- Fixing poor passwords and bad database configurations
- Securing networks and endpoints
- Modernizing application security by incorporating data loss prevention techniques, alerting and encryption
- Setting permissioned controls for visibility and exchanging data in multi-enterprise business settings.
How Is Microsoft Cloud App Security Licensed?
The following licensing plans include Microsoft Security:
- Microsoft 365 E5
- Enterprise Mobility & Security E5 (EMS E5)
- Microsoft Cloud App Security + Enterprise Mobility & Security E3 (EMS E3)
Microsoft security is a highly trustworthy and capable defense system against cybercriminals and malware. More importantly, it is offered free of charge by Microsoft.
On that note, some people might wonder, is Github secure? Yes, Github security is quite impressive as the repository has specific features to ensure security, such as instant responding to vulnerabilities in the supply chain.
Likewise, you can find exploitable and high-priority security issues in the code and manage vulnerabilities that could expose your supply chain to potential cyberattacks.
Recently, Github has also showcased its progress on GitHub Security Lab, a space for developers and security researchers to share expertise and remove vulnerabilities to improve the platform’s code sharing ecosystem.
According to Jamie Cool, the VP of product management at GitHub, “GitHub Security Lab’s mission is to inspire and enable the global security research community to secure the world’s code. Our team will lead by example, dedicating full-time resources to finding and reporting vulnerabilities in critical open source projects”.
Therefore, there’s no question about GitHub being secure since the platform is actively working to bring experts on the same page and improve the overall security of their code-sharing ecosystem.
Resources: