Danny Palmer
| July 22, 2021 — 11:49 GMT (12:49 BST)
| Topic: Security
The security risks around remote working and how your organization can overcome them
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Cloud computing services have become a vital tool for most businesses. It’s a trend that has accelerated recently, with cloud-based services such as Zoom, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace and many others becoming the collaboration and productivity tools of choice for teams working remotely.
While cloud quickly became an essential tool, allowing businesses and employees to continue operating from home, embracing the cloud can also bring additional cybersecurity risks, something that is now increasingly clear.
Previously, most people connecting to the corporate network would be doing so from their place of work, and thus accessing their accounts, files and company servers from inside the four walls of the office building, protected by enterprise-grade firewalls and other security tools. The expanded use of cloud applications meant that suddenly this wasn’t the case, with users able to access corporate applications, documents and services from anywhere. That has brought the need for new security tools.
Cloud computing security threats
In these circumstances, it could be useful to employ cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools. These can help organisations identify and remediate potential security issues around misconfiguration and compliance in the cloud, providing a means of reducing the attack surface available to hackers to examine, and helping to keep the cloud infrastructure secure against potential attacks and data breaches.
“Cloud security posture management is a technology that evaluates configuration drift in a changing environment, and will alert you if things are somehow out of sync with what your baseline is and that may indicate that there’s something in the system that means more can be exploited for compromise purposes,” says Merritt Maxim, VP and research director at Forrester.
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CSPM is an automated procedure and the use of automated management tools can help security teams stay on top of alerts and developments. Cloud infrastructure can be vast and having to manually comb through the services to find errors and abnormalities would be too much for a human – especially if there are dozens of different cloud services on the network. Automating those processes can, therefore, help keep the cloud environment secure.
“You don’t have enough people to manage 100 different tools in the environment that changes everyday, so I would say try to consolidate on platforms that solve a big problem and apply automation,” says TJ Gonen, head of cloud security at Check Point Software, a cybersecurity company.
Ensure the separation of administrator and user accounts
Cloud services can be complex and some members of the IT team will have highly privileged access to the service to help manage the cloud. A compromise of a high-level administrator account could give an attacker extensive control over the network and the ability to perform any action the administrator privileges allow, which could be extremely damaging for the company using cloud services.
It’s, therefore, imperative that administrator accounts are secured with tools such as multi-factor authentication and that admin-level privileges are only provided to employees who need them to do their jobs. According to the NCSC, admin-level devices should not be able to directly browse the web or read emails, as these could put the account at risk of being compromised.
It’s also important to ensure that regular users who don’t need administrative privileges don’t have them, because – in the event of account compromise – an attacker could quickly exploit this access to gain control of cloud services.
Use backups as contingency plan
But while cloud services can – and have – provided organisations around the world with benefits, it’s important not to rely on cloud for security entirely. While tools like two-factor authentication and automated alerts can help secure networks, no network is impossible to breach – and that’s especially true if extra security measures haven’t been applied.
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That’s why a good cloud security strategy should also involve storing backups of data and storing it offline, so in the event of an event that makes cloud services unavailable, there’s something there for the company to work with.
Use cloud applications that are simple for your employees to use
There’s something else that organisations can do to ensure the security of cloud – and that’s provide their employees with the correct tools in the first place. Cloud application suites can make collaboration easier for everyone, but they also need to be accessible and intuitive to use, or organisations run the risk of employees not wanting to use them.
A business could set up the most secure enterprise cloud suite possible, but if it’s too difficult to use, employees, frustrated with not being able to do their jobs, could turn to public cloud tools instead.
This issue could lead to corporate data being stored in personal accounts, creating greater risk of theft, especially if a user doesn’t have two-factor authentication or other controls in place to protect their personal account.
Information being stolen from a personal account could potentially lead to an extensive data breach or wider compromise of the organisation as a whole.
Therefore, for a business to ensure it has a secure cloud security strategy, not only should it be using tools like multi-factor authentication, encryption and offline backups to protect data as much as possible, the business must also make sure that all these tools are simple to use to encourage employees to use them correctly and follow best practices for cloud security.
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Danny Palmer
| July 22, 2021 — 11:49 GMT (12:49 BST)
| Topic: Security