What Is Cloud Security in Cloud Computing?

While businesses seek to improve agility, scalability, and profitability by embracing cloud computing, cybercriminals are increasingly setting their sights on cloud environments. When their attacks are successful, they can steal data, take over user accounts, drain funds from bank accounts, disrupt business services, and launch additional devastating attacks for fun and profit.

Achieving superior cloud security in cloud computing enables organizations to:

• Protect data: Security solutions for cloud computing help to enhance protection for valuable and sensitive data in the cloud, including personally identifiable information, patient records, customer data, financial information, intellectual property, business secrets, and other high-value assets.
• Maintain trust: Cloud security allows organizations to avoid security breaches that expose private data, which inevitably causes a loss of trust with customers, partners, and the public.
• Save money: Any breach in cloud security comes with significant costs in money, time, and resources, not to mention the costs of losing data and business opportunities.
• Improve productivity: The cloud has enabled remarkable gains in productivity, but all that is lost when cyberthreats disrupt services and cause downtime. By successfully stopping or preempting attacks, cloud security solutions enable employees to continue working at a pace to move the business forward.
• Ensure continuity: Since so many aspects of business operations today rely on cloud services, cloud security is essential to maintaining business continuity and enabling disaster recovery.
• Achieve compliance: Regulatory frameworks like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS have strict data security and data privacy requirements for how customer information is protected, stored, and used. Cloud security solutions provide greater visibility of, control over, and security for data in cloud computing environments, helping organizations to avoid regulatory fines and penalties.

To successfully protect cloud computing environments, security teams must overcome several significant security challenges.

• Lack of visibility and control: When organizations rely on public clouds, they inevitably give up some control over their assets in the cloud. Because some cloud service providers (CSPs) don’t offer visibility into their cloud infrastructure, security teams may have difficulty visualizing activity and resources in their cloud environments. This makes the task of setting security policy much more challenging.
• Complex IT environments: Many organizations today rely on hybrid cloud and multicloud environments, where infrastructure includes multiple public cloud services, private cloud solutions, and on-premises infrastructure. This complex mix creates a larger attack surface, making it harder to manage and maintain security than in traditional, on-premises deployments.
• Dynamic workloads: One of the great benefits of the cloud is the ability to spin up resources instantly on demand, and to terminate them the second they’re no longer needed. These temporary workloads also involve a variety of dynamic processes and resources like virtual machines (VMs), containers, and other technologies that can complicate cloud security
• Shadow IT instances: When employees use unsanctioned commercial cloud services to speed up workflows or circumvent cumbersome security requirements, IT teams are unaware of these shadow IT instances and can’t adequately protect them.
• Multi-tenant cloud environments: When organizations use public cloud service providers, their cloud resources may share a physical server with other customers or tenants. This opens the possibility that a customer’s cloud assets may be compromised by a malicious attack on another tenant.

Cloud security solutions must address multiple critical security threats to cloud computing environments.

• Data breaches:‌ One of the most damaging threats to cloud computing security, data breaches occur when hackers gain unauthorized access to sensitive data that’s stored in cloud environments. This can occur because of weak authentication mechanisms, misconfigured access controls, or vulnerabilities in applications and infrastructure that may be exploited by attackers.
• Insider threats: Cloud environments are particularly vulnerable to threats from within an organization. These may be malicious, as when disgruntled employees access sensitive data or deliberately allow ransomware to be downloaded. Alternatively, they may be the result of negligence or errors by unwitting users who mishandle data or fall for phishing attacks.
• Account hijacking: When attackers gain unauthorized access to a cloud account using stolen credentials or brute-force attacks on weak passwords, they can hijack these user accounts to launch additional attacks, exfiltrate data, or steal funds.
• Misconfiguration: Security teams who incorrectly configure controls and settings for cloud resources can unintentionally leave openings for attackers to access cloud environments. Unpatched systems, exposed storage buckets, and overly permissive access settings are common examples.
• API security: Application programming interfaces (APIs) are essential to integration and management of cloud services. However, APIs frequently lack the same protections afforded to cloud apps. As a result, attacks on APIs can easily result in service disruptions, data exposure, and unauthorized access to cloud environments.
• Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks: DDoS attacks are designed to disrupt business services by flooding cloud resources with an overwhelming amount of traffic or requests, causing them to crash or to experience degraded performance.
• Advanced persistent threats (APTs): These involve sophisticated, long-term attacks that target specific organizations. Attackers use multiple vectors and advanced evasion techniques to remain inside an IT environment for as long as possible, observing activity and compromising high-value assets.
• Malware: Hackers frequently target cloud environments with malware designed to compromise cloud data and applications. Malware may be used to steal, delete, or encrypt data, or to hijack an IT system.
• Cryptojacking: Attackers that access cloud environments through misconfiguration or unsecured cloud instances can use cloud resources to mine for cryptocurrency. This results in much greater consumption of computing resources and significant cost increases.

To protect their cloud deployments, security teams must adopt a multilayered approach to cloud security and cloud computing that combines several security strategies.

• Zero Trust security: The Zero Trust approach to security assumes that every request for access to cloud resources may be malicious. Consequently, every user, application, or device must be authenticated and authorized on every request for access. This effectively prevents unauthorized access and blocks attackers from moving laterally throughout a cloud environment they have compromised.
• Strong identity and access management (IAM): Robust IAM solutions enhance security by ensuring that only authorized users have access to specific cloud resources. Technologies include multi-factor authentication (MFA) and role-based access control (RBAC).
• Data encryption: Encrypting cloud data in transit, at rest, and in storage using strong encryption protocols protects sensitive information from being accessed or intercepted by unauthorized parties.
• Continuous monitoring and assessment: By continuously monitoring cloud environments and conducting regular security audits, teams can proactively identify and mitigate vulnerabilities to maintain a robust security posture. Vulnerability assessments and penetration testing can also help to identify and address potential security weaknesses.
• Network segmentation and microsegmentation: Segmenting cloud networks and cloud assets allows IT teams to protect individual workloads and applications with more granular security policies. This also helps to minimize the “blast radius” and limit lateral movement in the case of a breach.
• Security awareness training: Educating users about security hygiene, cloud security best practices, and the telltale signs of phishing attacks reduces the risk of human error.
• Automation technologies: Organizations can leverage technologies like machine learning for threat detection, automated patch management, and orchestration tools to improve the efficiency of security measures and keep pace with the evolving threat landscape.
• Secure APIs: To prevent unauthorized access and data breaches through insecure APIs, teams must ensure that APIs are designed securely, use strong authentication and authorization mechanisms, and regularly test for vulnerabilities.

Putting multiple layers of defenses in place is the best approach to achieving cloud security in cloud computing environments. The most effective technologies and security tools include:

• Cloud access security brokers (CASBs): By acting as an intermediary between cloud users and cloud service providers, CASBs can enforce security policies, enhance data loss prevention efforts, improve visibility, and ensure compliance.
• Cloud workload protection platforms (CWPPs): Providing vulnerability management, runtime protection, and container security, CWPPs protect applications and workloads running in public cloud environments.
• Cloud security posture management (CSPM): These tools continuously monitor cloud environments for compliance and security risks, helping to maintain a strong security posture and ensuring compliance with standards and regulations.
• Data loss prevention (DLP): DLP solutions inspect content and perform contextual analysis to identify and block sensitive data or high-value information that’s being inadvertently leaked or maliciously exfiltrated.
• Network security solutions: Firewalls, virtual private networks (VPNs), and intrusion detection/prevention systems (IDS/IPS) protect cloud networks from cyberthreats and unauthorized access.
• Encryption: Tools for end-to-end encryption, encrypted storage, and secure key management prevent attackers from accessing sensitive data even when it is intercepted or stolen.
• Security information and event management (SIEM): These systems aggregate and perform real-time analysis of security alerts generated by cloud applications and infrastructure.
• Endpoint detection and response (EDR): Endpoint solutions monitor and respond to suspicious activities on endpoints connected to cloud resources.
• Firewalls: Firewalls protect cloud networks from unauthorized access and cyberthreats by monitoring and filtering traffic to spot‌ suspicious activity.
• Identity and access management (IAM): IAM solutions manage identities and control user access to cloud resources to ensure that only authorized entities can access sensitive data and applications.

When designing cloud security in cloud computing deployments, IT teams must understand the shared responsibility model for the specific cloud service they’re seeking to protect.

When working with CSPs, responsibility for security is split between the CSP and the customer. CSPs are always responsible for managing physical and cybersecurity for their data centers, servers, storage, and networking hardware used to provide cloud services. Customers are always responsible for managing user identities, permissions, and authentication mechanisms, and controlling who has access to the cloud platform and the resources and data on it.

Beyond these basic responsibilities, security is shared in different ways for each cloud service model.

• Software as a service (SaaS) cloud platforms enable organizations to use the web to access applications hosted by the CSP. In ‌SaaS environments, the CSP is ‌responsible for securing the application and supporting infrastructure. Customers need only worry about managing their data, authenticating users, and configuring security permissions.
• Platform as a service (PaaS) solutions allow customers to develop, run, and manage applications without worrying about managing or securing the underlying infrastructure. PaaS platforms shift more responsibility to the customer, who must manage security for applications and related data, while the CSP helps to secure the underlying infrastructure and overall operating systems.
• Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platforms provide virtualized computing resources to users, who are responsible for managing infrastructure components like virtual machines, storage, and networks. With IaaS platforms, the cloud security responsibility for the customer is much greater, as they must help to secure cloud data, operating systems, and software stacks running their applications.

Understanding the differences and responsibilities for each platform the organization uses is critical to eliminating any security gaps.