What Is Cloud Security?
How Cloud Security Works
1. Server Protection
2. Data Examination and Filtration
3. Data Flow Encryption and Management
4. Policy and Compliance Enforcement
Importance of Cloud Security
The cloud is often used to store various kinds of sensitive data, thus requiring robust security measures to defend against unauthorized users and cyberattacks. Cloud security is essential for several reasons:
Centralized Protection
Cloud security enables organizations to simultaneously implement comprehensive data security and privacy policies, ensuring consistent protection across all data. By centralizing security measures, organizations enhance visibility, reduce recovery time, and maintain business continuity.
Controlled Costs and Fines
Implementing security measures within cloud-based assets helps organizations avoid additional costs associated with data protection measures that might evolve as businesses grow.
Data breaches in cloud environments can spread more quickly, requiring swift and precise incident response operations. Cloud security ensures that incident response plans are effective, measurable, and scalable, allowing organizations to mitigate and recover from security incidents.
Enhanced Cyber Resilience
Cloud security services automate manual security operations, allowing IT teams to focus on critical business and technical processes. By leveraging cloud security solutions, organizations can scale their security operations and optimize resources to improve overall cyber resilience.
Traditional IT Security vs. Cloud Security
The transition to cloud-based computing has significantly transformed traditional IT security. While cloud models provide more convenience, they also introduce new security challenges due to their distinct characteristics, and they differ from traditional IT systems in several ways.
To prevent unwanted access, cloud security employs data-centric approaches, such as data encryption, authorization processes, and multi-factor authentication. In contrast, traditional security relies on a host-based architecture to manage access.
Cloud data storage allows organizations to automate backups on geographically dispersed servers, providing additional security against data compromise. Automated approaches are more efficient and cost-effective than traditional IT solutions, often requiring redundant backups in multiple locations.
Traditional IT security operations are prone to human errors that threat actors can easily exploit. On the other hand, cloud security leverages advanced machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) computing practices to streamline the detection, diagnosis, prioritization, and deployment of security controls. By minimizing the frequency of human-centric security incidents, cloud security mitigates real-time cyber risks while significantly reducing the time and cost of remediation.
Cloud Security Risks and Challenges
Poor Visibility: Losing track of which users access company data can be a common challenge, as many cloud services are available outside corporate networks and through third parties. When using cloud services, data loss is often the result of poor visibility and can happen if data is accidentally deleted, overwritten or if a cloud system is corrupted.
Multitenancy: Public cloud environments house several client infrastructures under the same roof. Thus, hostile attackers may utilize those hosted services as collateral damage when attacking other businesses.
Evolving Compliance Landscape: As business needs expand, so do compliance requirements. Managing evolving and emerging compliance requirements for cloud-based assets often becomes challenging for organizations, especially for assets without a robust cloud security strategy.
Types of Cloud Security Solutions
Businesses large and small contend with a growing number of devices, each adding to attack surfaces. At the same time, most enterprises face a cybersecurity skill gap and resources shortages. Cybersecurity staffing is particularly troublesome for small and mid-sized businesses.
As a human-centric subscription-based 24x7x365 Managed XDR service, CylanceGUARD® provides the expertise and support businesses need. CylanceGUARD combines the comprehensive expertise embodied by BlackBerry Cybersecurity Services with AI-based Endpoint Protection (EPP) through CylanceENDPOINT™. In short, CylanceGUARD provides business with the people and technology needed to protect the enterprise from the modern threat landscape.