Today the cloud is the best way to store your organisational data, allowing employees to work together from anywhere across the world all using the same data point. Maximising the efficacy of the cloud and overcoming myriad risks means implementing cloud security best practices. Here’s where to start.
Applying strong data protection measures and safeguards not only protects individual data against cyber threats, but more importantly your whole organisation’s sensitive information. In 2023 alone, there were over 2300 cyberattacks which resulted in over 343 million victims – a whopping 72% increases in data breaches since 2021.
What Are Cloud Security Best Practices?
In the cloud, data breaches can result in unauthorised access, theft, or even exposure of sensitive information, leading to many problems for your business. While substantial financial repercussions are often motivation enough, there’s also the threat of severe reputation damage, undermined customer confidence, and a long-term weakening of your brand’s positioning to consider.
Keeping the cloud secure relies on the implementation of some key best practices.
When it comes to building the best cloud security defences, your greatest hope lies in a combination of defensive elements.
Zero Trust – A zero trust architecture follows the idea of ‘never trust, always verify’, regardless of if the person or device exists within the company network. Every access request goes thorough authentication, authorisation, and encryption before being granted. Meanwhile, advanced intelligence and analytics are employed to detect and respond to anomalies in real time. Zero Trust has three core principles, which Microsoft states as:
- Verify explicitly: Always authenticate by the most data points available.
- Use least-privilege access: Keep access to ‘just enough’ and ‘just-in-time’.
- Assume breach: Leverage analytics for visibility and minimise fallout.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) – MFA is a popular security method that requires multiple factors to verify someone’s identity, thereby granting access. These factors typically include something you know (such as a password or PIN), something you have (like a key, smart card, or authenticator app), and something you are(such as a fingerprint or other biometric data).
MFA can significantly increase your business’s security by demanding more than just a username and password for user identification – increasing the chances of being protected against rapidly evolving cyber threats.
Joiners Movers Leavers (JML) – When new employees join, change roles, or leave the company, it’s important to ensure their access to systems and sensitive data is updated. This seemingly simple – but often overlooked – task is crucial to remaining secure against potential data breaches. By ensuring that only the right people and devices have access to the right information at the right times, you’re preventing unauthorised access and protecting sensitive data with a secure working environment.
With 82% of reported breaches involving a human element, businesses need an equally people-based solution. Properly managing employee access with a secure JML process goes a long way to significantly decreasing the aforementioned human element – ultimately enhancing cloud security.
Using these three defences – alongside others – will give you the peace of mind that your business is protected against the rising tide of data breaches.
What’s Standing Between You and Cloud Harmony?
Although we might know and understand the cloud security best practices that will protect the business environment, knowledge is only half the challenge. In 2023, for example, insufficient budget remained the primary challenge for IT professionals trying to ensure data security in the cloud. Overcoming budgetary limitations is a crucial step towards enacting best practices.
That’s where cloud optimisation and Surveil comes in.
Surveil is the Microsoft analytics platform, underpinning successful cloud security with actionable insights and business intelligence. Surveil can pinpoint weak security areas within the Microsoft 365 and Azure estates – including users and admins without MFA enabled, governance recommendations based on advanced insights, and potential threats ready to escalate.
To help overcome IT’s ongoing budgetary challenges, Surveil can also identify areas of cost optimisation, including the consolidation of duplicated functionality, unused cloud resources, and licensing overspend. With the resulting saves, IT teams can reinvest in powerful security plays.
With Surveil in your corner, establishing, maintaining, and funding the implementation of cloud security best practices has never been easier.
Want to find out more about maintaining the best security in the cloud? Check out our other security blogs here.
