Data in droves

Each day about 500 million tweets are shared, four petabytes of data are created on Facebook, and more than 5 billion searches are made on the Internet.  

These facts might amaze you, but with the influx of digital and emerging technologies, data proliferation has been exponential. Traditionally, most enterprises thrived in an environment defined by security boundaries, where it was relatively easy to manage compliances and controls.

Those days are over. 

Thanks to evolving business dynamics, enterprises are taking a cloud-first approach, combining multiple cloud platforms as the best-fit approach to usher in agility, innovation, and scalability. While “the more, the merrier” can be a rule of thumb for data, it doesn’t come without its share of caveats and constraints regarding data risk, security, and compliance.

This raises concerns over security and regulatory compliance. Your enterprise cloud security systems merit due consideration, given the increasing complexity and scale of cyber threats. Simply put, cloud security is a branch of the larger security ecosystem that exclusively deals with securing cloud computing systems. It involves: 

• Strategy for cyber threat prevention, detection, and mitigation.

• Legal and regulatory compliance.

• Access and identity controls.

• Business continuity plan. 

Deciphering today’s cloud security landscape

The security landscape has been evolving rapidly, with digital maturity and businesses accelerating their cloud adoption:

• As enterprises embark on hybrid multi-cloud environments, data risk exposure mapping becomes more complex. The high availability of computing paradigms and a rapidly expanding application environment make data control more difficult.

• Data-intensive and high-speed networking technologies like WiF-6, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and 5G are driving competitive advantage. But they have also raised various privacy and ethical concerns.

• As the technology landscape evolves, regulatory norms are getting tighter. Legislations in the EU and the Americas have enforced increasingly stringent controls, including General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). The onus of ensuring data security and privacy lies with all the stakeholders involved in the business value chain. 

• Typically, in a conventional setup, cloud security isn’t considered an integral part of enterprise governance strategy because its benefits are not measured and quantified as a value or return on investment. As a result, marketing or product positioning strategy often fails to highlight cloud security investments.

• Some enterprises continue to view cloud security from an outdated business and technology standpoint, seldom relevant in today’s digital world. They need to realize the importance of safeguarding their digital footprint and digital assets from internal and external threats.

The four-pronged approach

Enterprises should adopt a cloud-agnostic approach with a centralized security monitoring system as a base for a multi-cloud security strategy. Here are a few things you should focus on:

Get full visibility into operations: Enterprises must first understand their risk exposure to know what might hit them. Here, visibility becomes the foremost factor that affects response and readiness. Highly regulated industries are building a complimentary birds’ eye view of their information systems. The rest are leveraging APIs and other native services for building interactive dashboards that offer a holistic view of affected systems and notify the right roles when mishaps occur.

Guard access: Role and attribute-based access controls can help secure sensitive data through a layered approach to protecting sensitive information. 

Likewise, introducing simple policies and educative measures can help evade the biggest yet simplest attacks like phishing, ransomware and spoofing that can lead to regulatory disasters, data breaches, and big equity and brand value losses. 

Embed security into software development: To unleash DevSecOps, enterprises must build security milestones into their continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI-CD) pipelines. For instance, security validation is necessary in every implementation phase—from design till deployment—for application and infrastructure.

Adopt an extended enterprise worldview: Educating customers and end users on the enterprise’s approach to security best practices and incorporating partners, third parties, and vendors in the larger digital risk management framework is key to sealing data leakages.