With the exponential increase in cloud adoption, businesses need to gear up to establish the effectiveness of their cloud security strategies. Today, as technologies evolve rapidly, we must realize that the cyber-threat landscape also keeps evolving and broadening, exposing more attack surfaces. Validating cloud security translates to warranting the integrity and security of the cloud environment of an organization, to ensure that it is capable of protecting sensitive data and critical applications.
In other words, cloud security validation ensures that the overall cloud infrastructure of an enterprise fulfills necessary regulatory protocols, security standards, and best practices. Cloud security validation evaluates and validates diverse cloud security aspects like access controls, configuration settings, encryptions, and other security policies to help security teams quickly detect and address security issues proactively and prevent recurrences.
Organizations can adopt different steps to validate cloud security.
- Evaluation of the cloud security posture
Assessing the existing security posture is the first step toward validating enterprise cloud security. This helps reveal any hidden vulnerabilities in the cloud infrastructure so that such gaps can be closed at the earliest. Different frameworks, such as Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM), Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), and ISO 27001, provide a complete set of criteria to benchmark the cloud security posture of an enterprise against industry best practices and standards. It offers clarity and helps organizations prioritize security actions and amendments.
- Regular audit of cloud logs and activities
Continuous monitoring and periodic auditing of cloud logs and activities help detect and respond to any anomalous, or suspicious happenings, such as sudden changes in configuration, data leaks, or illicit access. Audits can be conducted using specialized applications that gather, analyze, and alert upon discovering suspicious activities on the cloud. Enforcing access control, retention, and encryption on cloud logs will help preserve their integrity.
- Security automation and planning
Automating and orchestrating security helps fine-tune the efficiency of security measures and warrants effectiveness while minimizing human errors and saving time and resources. The most sought-after method of automating and streamlining security tasks is by using scripts and software. Additionally, code reviews, version control tools, and testing tools can also help ensure the security and quality of automation scripts.
- Vulnerability scanning and penetration testing
Vulnerability scanning helps detect, analyze, and report security weaknesses, with the overall intention of protecting an enterprise from cyberattacks and disclosure of sensitive data. This approach can be adopted to inspect a potential target attack surface across a complex organizational network. Penetration testing helps validate cloud security based on “real” attacks and is governed by threat intelligence, which tests defenses against the latest security threats. It helps verify the actual readiness and effectiveness of the security defense of an organization while exposing potential gaps and misconfigurations. Vulnerability scanning combined with penetration testing should ideally be performed after major configuration changes, to analyze and remediate potential flaws in the security framework.
- Employee training and education
Most often, the most devastating security breaches are caused by human error due to a lack of awareness, compliance, or skills. So it is crucial to train and educate the human workforce regularly to generate greater awareness about cloud security. That includes providing relevant training across organization hierarchies, including administrators, developers, managers, and well as end-users.
- Regular review and update of cloud security policy
Cloud security validation is a continuous process that should ideally be as dynamic as the ever-evolving threat landscape. So, it demands continuous validation and improvement to ensure the readiness of organizations to detect and preempt security breaches and prevent their recurrence. The cloud security strategy should be altered and updated whenever there are changes to business requirements, objectives, or even the environment. It is equally crucial to review existing cloud security policies to ensure their relevance in the current context so that they perfectly align with business policies to support the common values and goals of the enterprise.
ConclusionÂ
Cloud security validation should be continuous, automated, comprehensive, and based on the timeliness of actionable attack intelligence. By validating cloud security, business leadership can acquire an accurate picture of the security and risk posture of the organization. This picture ultimately empowers them to formulate strategies that help minimize risks and retain operational capabilities.