What Is Cloud Security?

Cloud resources are vulnerable to a broad range of security risks and cyberthreats.

• Data breaches: When attackers gain unauthorized access to sensitive data that is stored in the cloud, it can lead to financial losses, legal penalties, and damage to an organization’s reputation.
• Misconfiguration: Incorrect settings in cloud services may inadvertently expose cloud resources to the public internet or leave them open to easy access for attackers.
• Malware injection: When attackers inject malicious software into cloud services through insecure software or code vulnerabilities, they can compromise data integrity, disrupt services, or gain unauthorized access to cloud environments and assets.
• Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks: Attackers frequently attempt to overwhelm cloud services by flooding them with traffic and malicious requests, causing them to become unavailable to legitimate users. This can disrupt business operations and lead to downtime and financial losses.
• Insider threats: Malicious or negligent actions by employees or contractors who have access to cloud resources can result in data breaches, service disruptions, and loss of intellectual property.
• Insecure APIs and interfaces: Hackers frequently target application programming interfaces (APIs) and other entry interfaces that are not adequately protected by API security measures. This allows them to gain unauthorized access to user accounts, disrupt services, and launch additional attacks.
• Advanced persistent threats (APTs): These are prolonged and targeted cyberattacks in which threat actors remain undetected within a cloud environment for days or weeks, enabling them to compromise high-value targets that lead to significant data loss and long-term damage to the organization.

Cloud security is considerably more difficult than protecting traditional IT environments because there are no clear parameters to defend. The highly distributed nature of cloud computing is made even more challenging as organizations adopt automated continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) methodologies for the software development lifecycle, as well as technology like containers and serverless architectures.

The specific challenges of ensuring cloud security include:

• Complex hybrid cloud infrastructure: IT environments today are often made up of a complex mix of multicloud and hybrid cloud environments. These may span on-premises resources, private clouds, and public cloud services from providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, making it difficult to consistently set and enforce security policies.
• Larger attack surface: As cloud computing environments grow exponentially, they become an ever more attractive target for cybercriminals seeking to gain access to IT assets.
• Poor visibility: Many organizations use cloud service providers that do not provide full visibility into the infrastructure layer of cloud environments. As a result, many IT teams lack full visibility of their cloud environments and the assets within it.
• Dynamic workloads: Cloud workloads can be highly ephemeral as users quickly spin up and release cloud instances. Ensuring the security of virtual machines (VMs), containers, databases, and other aspects of cloud workloads can be enormously difficult.
• Compliance issues: Regulatory frameworks like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS have strict rules for how organizations store, use, access, and protect private data belonging to customers and patients. When this information is stored in the cloud — in data centers anywhere in the world — it’s harder for IT teams to ensure that this data complies with residency and sovereignty requirements.
• Use of shadow IT: With more employees working remotely and using personal devices, the risk of shadow IT increases. When users seek to improve productivity or access functionality by using unapproved commercial cloud services, IT is unaware of these resources and can’t protect them.

An additional complication in cloud security is the difference in how security responsibility is shared between cloud service providers (CSPs) and customers in each service model: software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

In each model, CSPs are responsible for securing the infrastructure and foundational services while customers are responsible for handling data security, identity and access management, and other aspects of security, depending on the service model.

• SaaS platforms give organizations internet access to applications hosted by a service provider that is responsible for managing the underlying infrastructure as well as the applications and operating system. Customers are responsible for securing data, endpoints, and user access.
• PaaS offerings enable customers to develop, run, and manage applications without needing to configure and manage the underlying infrastructure. CSPs secure the platform services and runtime environment, while the customer is responsible for securing applications, encrypting sensitive data, and managing user access.
• IaaS environments provide customers with virtualized computing resources over the internet, enabling customers to access virtual machines, cloud storage, and networks. CSPs are responsible for securing the physical infrastructure and virtualization layer, while customers are responsible for configuring and managing security for virtual machines, networks, applications, data, and user access.

Misunderstandings about how security responsibilities are shared for each service model can lead to dangerous security gaps.

IT and security teams may employ a wide array of solutions to build multiple layers of cloud security.

• Identity and access management (IAM) solutions provide authentication and authorization mechanisms that determine who a user is, what they are allowed to access, and what they can do with cloud resources. IAM solutions use technology like multi-factor authentication (MFA) and access control lists to restrict access to authorized users. IAM helps to mitigate the threats of unauthorized users accessing cloud assets and authorized users taking advantage of broad or loose privileges. In addition to preventing unauthorized access, IAM technology can mitigate insider threats and account takeover attacks.
• Data loss prevention (DLP) tools monitor and inspect data flowing out of the organization to prevent exfiltration and malicious or accidental leaks.
• Security information and event management (SIEM) tools analyze security logs in real time to provide greater visibility into activity within the cloud ecosystem.
• Data protection solutions encrypt data at rest, in transit, and in storage to prevent attackers from intercepting and reading sensitive data.
• Cloud firewalls are hosted in the cloud rather than on-premises and help to block vulnerability exploits, DDoS attacks, and malicious bot activity.
• Zero Trust security controls limit access to only authorized users and only to the resources they need to perform a specific function.
• Network security solutions use firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and virtual private networks (VPNs) to secure network communications.
• Microsegmentation divides networks and environments into smaller segments that can be managed with granular security policies, preventing attackers who have successfully accessed one part of an environment from compromising additional assets.
• Cloud workload protection (CWP) solutions protect workloads in cloud environments. These solutions provide comprehensive security for cloud-based applications, containers, and virtual machines.
• Web application firewalls (WAFs) protect web apps and cloud native applications by filtering and monitoring HTTP traffic between apps and the internet. They help prevent attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other threats by enforcing security policies at the application level.
• Threat intelligence solutions enable security teams to anticipate and preempt security threats with defensive protections.
• Endpoint security solutions monitor devices as they connect to cloud resources to identify and mitigate potential threats.
• Incident response plans enable teams to respond immediately to breaches to avoid interruptions and recover lost data.
• Business continuity and disaster recovery solutions help to minimize the impact of lapses in cloud security.
• Monitoring and threat detection security services use real-time monitoring and threat intelligence to detect and identify security issues and prioritize remediation.

Organizations can improve cloud computing security by adhering to several key best practices.

• Enforce consistent policies across all clouds: While the distributed nature of hybrid cloud environments is more difficult to manage, teams must work diligently to ensure that security policies extend to every aspect of the IT ecosystem.
• Configure security settings properly: IT teams must work closely with cloud vendors and adhere to recommended settings when configuring cloud servers. This helps to avoid misconfiguration that can expose cloud assets to the wider internet.
• Implement robust backup plans: A solid plan for backing up data helps organizations to stay resilient and recover quickly from a successful cyberattack. Effective backup and recovery solutions enable business processes to continue uninterrupted.
• Conduct security awareness training: Many data breaches originate with human error. Training users to recognize the signs of phishing attacks and to practice superior security hygiene can help to mitigate the risk of cyberattacks and improve cloud security.
• Leverage automation: Using automated security tools can help teams improve management of security configuration and incident remediation efforts.