Cloud security is often referred to as technologies and measures used to protect cloud-based infrastructures from external and internal cyberattacks. Providing information technology services online, or what is usually known as cloud computing, has become necessary for both government and businesses that are looking forward to enhancing their businesses in terms of creativity and collaboration.  

As per a survey done by Gartner, almost 61% of the chief information officers or the CIOs are moving their investments to technology and cyber security.

Majorly the public cloud service providers take care of the information as a service, firewall as a service, and platform as a service layer. At the same time, the businesses are responsible for taking care of their execution layer. The companies are responsible for deriving an overall user management experience regarding the business applications and their security. Here are five proven tactics that helped businesses to safeguard their operations in a cloud environment. Have a look!  

Utilization of a risk-based approach to managing vulnerabilities  

Businesses usually tend to pay more attention to the vulnerability scanning processes and zero days vulnerabilities, especially when the comparison is between the reality of the threat and the way it is perceived. Those zero days vulnerabilities hold importance as metrics; they are not the most significant issues for an organization. Having a risk-based approach for managing vulnerabilities helps the companies in the identification of real threat areas.  

The risk-based approach helps prioritize and evaluate the threat based on how easily it can be used against the company. This approach helps implement measures against vulnerabilities that could significantly threaten an IT environment.

It is advised to go for visualization of threats in the real-life exploitation index, which is all about mapping the threats based on their application status in the company's environment. Every vulnerability comes with a precondition responsible for limiting the applicability level and reducing the impact or the risk score.  

Implementation of multifactor authentication 

Using the traditional combination of passwords and usernames is not enough to provide viable protection to your account from hackers. Misusing credentials is one of the most popular ways hackers can access your company's sensitive data. Once the hackers gain access to your credentials, they can easily log into the programs on the cloud and modify the usage of your day-to-day services for business.  

With the use of multifactor authentication, all your cloud users remain protected. It ensures that only authorized employees can access the login credentials to the cloud applications and sensitive data on and off-premises environments.  

Managing the cloud security posture  

In the public cloud, one of the essential security requirements is to keep misconfigurations at bay and, if required, fix it quickly. Cloud landscapes can turn vulnerable unexposed with misconfigurations, and it is better to detect the misconfigurations quickly. Only tools cannot solve this problem; people must be trained to fix misconfigurations.  

With team training on the management of cloud security postures, businesses can easily detect misconfigurations early in the stage of the development and testing pipeline and throughout the operational, deployment, and scanning process. Also, it helps businesses to rely less on default controls. The company will be able to enhance the security coverage for monitoring use cases in the working environment.  

Develop a concept for the management of critical access and identities  

It is imperative to control and assign access to sensitive company data to avoid breaches. This can be done quickly by having a privileged identity and access management concept inclusive of the following: monitoring privileged access, separation of identities for roles, duties, and authorizations, and integration with the security monitoring platform.  

The division of authorization, duties, and roles should be discussed for critical security processes like encryption. in case all the encryption keys are food in the hardware security modules, only the authorized employers should be able to access and control the systems.  

Pay attention to the monitoring of end-to-end security

Only an antivirus program will not be sufficient for securing the company against security breaches and cyber-attacks. A firewall as a service in the cloud environment is your answer to complete security. Without having a trained team and proper technology, it becomes next to impossible to get the appropriate visibility, and improper visibility efficiency cannot be achieved.  

In the current scenario, companies need to have three modules for excellent end-to-end security monitoring: a proper security monitoring system, efficient cyber threat intelligence, and a stack of technology to rely on for detection and fixing activities. This is also inclusive of threat modeling based on real-life threat intelligence.  

Though improving cloud security is a never-ending task, the measures mentioned above can surely assist you in doing so.