Cloud Security As more and more businesses and individuals adopt cloud computing and storage, security issues that surround the technology have come into the spotlight. Cloud security is a very important area of cybersecurity that is seeing extremely swift development. Here’re some of the latest trends in cloud security. If your business is shopping around for a new cloud management solution or cloud services provider, then you need to look into each of these areas before coming to a decision.
Automated Management
The latest cloud computing and storage management solutions have automated responses to breaches and changes of rules. Protocols are immensely important in the correct management of cloud security. Protocols need to reflect the boundaries within which a system can be safely used. Companies like Ave Point and their competitors offer automated security reporting and solutions as part of their management offers. Automation is a key tool in the fight against unauthorized data leakage, intellectual property theft and ransom attacks. Ransomware attacks can be particularly devastating to companies hosting sensitive data.
Defending Against Supply Chain Attacks
A supply chain attack occurs when a malicious entity infects third-party software with malware. This software is then unwittingly downloaded and spreads the malware to otherwise secure computers or cloud storage networks. Perhaps the most famous example of a supply chain attack was the SolarWinds malware, which was spread when people downloaded seemingly innocuous software updates. Supply chain attacks can seriously compromise even the most secure cloud network. The solution, according to many experts, is to severely limit the ability of software to auto-update and restrict the machine and human access to files held in cloud storage.
Zero Trust
It has now become blindingly obvious to all that hackers and rogue software will typically find a way to get past conventional security measures, no matter how sophisticated they are. The response to this has been a reliance upon more simple measures – including zero-trust network security. Zero trust network security protocols deny every kind of privilege to communicating machines and software without authentication. Zero trust has become something of a buzzword among cloud security experts, but it is very rarely implemented entirely. Doing so could compromise the speed of a network. Some kind of partial trust solution is sought by most experts.
Strengthening Machine Identity
Most businesses have cottoned on to the fact that humans need to be positively identified if they are attempting to gain access to a cloud server. This means that multi-factor authentication – including biometric or hardware authentication – is commonplace within cloud networks. Machine identity is a much more unknown quantity. Hardware and software gain access to the cloud by positively identifying themselves, but hackers have recently focused on creating bogus machine identities in order to gain access to well-protected areas. This means that cyber security experts have been rushing to develop more robust machine identity policies that allow networks to operate at full speed without being easy to break into using a false ID.
