5 Tips to Mitigate Cloud Cybersecurity Anomalies

Laura Nutt
4 min readApr 6, 2021

Hosting your business and consumer data on the cloud may offer countless benefits in terms of management, scalability, and access. But the fact that cloud security breaches are rapidly growing can’t be overlooked.

With around 94% of the enterprises using cloud platforms, data security is becoming the immediate necessity for every industry.

Businesses need to put their best foot forward to enhance data safety since inadequate decisions made around building cloud strategy and implementation can increase the risk of security threats.

Let’s have a quick look at several aspects that can help reduce the risk and mitigate cloud cybersecurity anomalies.

1. Data encryption is the key

Enterprises leveraging cloud services shouldn’t ignore the importance of cloud data encryption. Data encryption allows seamless transformation of data while it is stored and accessed by a user.

Companies should ask their cloud service providers regarding the overall management and storage of data and must ensure that the movement of data in their cloud is well protected.

How does this work?

Well, the encrypted data can be decrypted only by using a special decipher key, which is available with the owner. This means no data request could be completed without involving the owner.

Data owners just need to be quite careful regarding the storage of the key as it shouldn’t be stored at the same place the data is stored.

2. Establish cloud governance policies

If a business needs to enhance the overall cloud security, cloud application governance policies like GDPR and CCPA should be kept in place to ensure compliance with data privacy mandates.

Training developers and other deployment team members regarding the mandatory compliances and their use while using cloud services is essential to avoid data theft while it’s stored or being retrieved.

Apart from this, data must be classified in the order of its sensitivity. This further aids in the security of confidential data by using the right data security technique.

3. Endpoint security

Regular resource testing coupled with trusted security certificates helps to ensure data security over the cloud.

Since users may use different devices for accessing information of a particular company, the chances of data theft and malware attacks increases.

It’s a universal fact that nobody likes to remember long passwords and user ids. This significantly increases the need for single sign-on options within a network.

Using Single Sign-On (SSO) is yet another great way to enhance security while the users log in to their profiles to access data stored on the cloud.

SSO helps to prevent data thefts since users need not remember their login credentials and can log in with existing credentials. This minimizes any risk of identity theft attack by a cybercriminal.

Make sure that your end-to-end security is adequate to prevent unauthorized access to confidential information since intruders are always looking for ways to breach endpoint security by mimicking login identities.

4. Prevent internal threats

As a business, you have to ensure that your company’s crucial data isn’t exposed to internal security risks, which can drastically impact your first line of defense.

If your employees aren’t fully educated regarding safety practices while using cloud services, you may end up losing millions of dollars.

Training your employees for digital security who are working with cloud data is now more crucial than ever before. They must be well-versed with the potential risks and how to securely log in and work on crucial data.

Moreover, organizing frequent training sessions about the latest threats would not only help to prevent a security breach but will eventually educate your employees regarding things that they must avoid while accessing information from cloud storage.

5. Access management

Just because your data is stored over the cloud doesn’t necessarily guarantee it’s secure. A loophole in managing the access of important data over the cloud could drastically impact an organization.

Enterprises must ensure they have established access management to minimize security vulnerabilities by restricting the individuals from accessing information that only senior-level management could access.

Furthermore, enhanced security measures like multi-factor authentication can be put in place to authenticate users if there’s any risk associated while a user tries to log in.

Conclusion

From the past couple of months, businesses have witnessed a substantial number of security breaches as cybercriminals exploited cloud security vulnerabilities.

If you’re aware of the threats that can lead to a cloud security breach, you can take more proactive decisions to improve the overall security of your cloud infrastructure.

The aforementioned tips help businesses in identifying the risks and prevent data loss while the information is being accessed or stored in the cloud.

--

--

Laura Nutt

CyberSecurity Enthusiast, interested in latest digital trends, reader, hiker. I’m available at https://www.quora.com/profile/Laura-Nutt-5