How You Are Compromising Your Cloud Security

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Considering the amount of data your business stores on the cloud, you want your cloud to be as secure as possible. Thankfully, most cloud services offer to maintain some of the best cybersecurity practices in the industry to keep vulnerabilities closed and access to your data limited.

Unfortunately, your cloud services provider is not the only entity responsible for cloud security. You have a significant impact on the safety of your cloud — and you are probably making some serious mistakes that are compromising security in a significant way. If you want your cloud to be as secure as possible, read on for some of the ways you might unknowingly be putting your cloud at risk.

Misconfiguration

You might have invested in the most secure cloud services and the best security systems that money can buy — but if you do not configure your tech tools properly, you will continue to be plagued by security issues. Misconfigurations are some of the most common causes of cloud data breaches, and almost every organization suffers from some misconfiguration of the cloud at some point.

Thus, whenever you make changes to your cloud services, your network architecture, your security solutions, and more, you should perform an audit for misconfigurations that could make you vulnerable to attack.

Some of the most common misconfigurations that impact your cloud security include:

• Unrestricted inbound ports. You should know the full number of open ports to your cloud and lock down or restrict those that are not necessary.
• Unrestricted outbound ports. You should restrict outbound communications, paying close attention to how you grant access to RDP and SSH.
• Poorly managed secrets. API keys, passwords, encryption keys, admin credentials, and other secrets should be inventoried and effectively secured in the cloud.
• Open ICMP. Because the ICMP provides so much information about your network, you need to ensure your cloud configuration blocks the ICMP.

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Improper Access

There are various ways that your cloud can allow access to individuals who wish to cause harm. If your cloud-based deployments are outside your network perimeter, your employees might find it easier to access your online resources — but attackers will, as well.

Likewise, if your workforce makes a habit of crafting weak passwords or reusing compromised passwords, their accounts could easily be hijacked by attackers looking to waltz into your cloud and steal your company’s data.

Finally, it is possible that amongst your ranks of employees there are a few disgruntled individuals who intend malicious behavior toward your enterprise. If they are granted full access to your cloud system, they can cause untold damage. You need to be careful regarding who has access to different layers of your cloud if you want any hope of cloud security.

Poor Visibility

Perhaps the most significant cloud security blunder you can make is reducing the visibility of your company’s cloud resources. There are many ways you might go about this, such as disabling the logging function of your cloud and ignoring the telemetry it can provide or else locating your cloud on infrastructure you do not own, which makes traditional cloud security tools less effective.

More monitoring capability is always better for security, as it allows you to identify vulnerabilities and threats before they become devastating. Wherever and whenever you can, you should increase your cloud visibility.

External Sharing

The fundamental purpose of the cloud is to make it easier to store and share data. Yet, too many organizations continue to share data outside the cloud; in fact, some clouds offer tools for sharing cloud-protected resources with users located outside the business network. Indeed, this can make collaborating with outside team members simpler, but it also tends to be a significant security risk.

Outside users might share their access with any number of additional users, or they might connect to the cloud on an insecure or compromised network. Instead of link-sharing with outside users, you should create cloud accounts for all users who need access to your cloud, so you have total control over who accesses your cloud.

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Your cloud services provider should be doing their utmost to protect your company’s cloud deployments, but you need to take steps to keep your cloud secure, too. Avoiding major cloud security mistakes like misconfigurations, improper access, poor visibility, and external sharing are the first steps to keeping your cloud, and your company, safe.