Guardians of the Digital Realm: Celebrating World Cloud Security Day
Jo Debecker, Managing Partner and Global Head of Wipro FullStride Cloud
The Cloud is essential for companies seeking to enhance their competitiveness by fostering growth and innovation. Many organizations have begun adopting a multicloud approach without implementing the necessary architecture and solutions to ensure seamless interoperability between different clouds, all while safeguarding the security of their data.
Ensuring data protection in a multi-cloud environment requires careful planning and implementation of security measures to protect data as it is moved from one environment to another. This means adopting the following measures:
- Data must be encrypted both in transit and at “rest” to protect it from unauthorized access. This includes encrypting data as it flows between different service providers and within each Cloud environment.
- Strong identity and access management policies, such as multi-factor authentication and role-based access control, are required to ensure that only authorized users have access to data.
- Determining the data according to its sensitivity and regulatory requirements is a key element in determining the appropriate security measures to be applied to each dataset.
- Data should be backed up regularly and stored in a secure environment. In the event of a security breach or data loss, having a backup and recovery plan in place ensures that data is not permanently lost.
- Implementing security monitoring and analysis tools to detect security threats and counter them in real time.
Companies must implement a combination of technical measures, policies, and procedures to ensure that their data is backed up and protected in a multi-cloud environment. Therefore, it is important to work with vendors and security experts to design and deploy a comprehensive data protection strategy that meets the specific needs of each organization.
- How can organizations ensure cloud security cover, and why is it important?
“There is no “ensure” in the business of cybersecurity, organizations focus on knowing and managing their cyber risks within the boundaries of an acceptable threshold. When it comes to the cloud much of that risk is managed by cloud service providers (CSPs) with varying degrees of responsibility depending on the type of service rendered. Organizations transitioning more services into the cloud need to track a new set of risks that are unique to the environment and retire others that are no longer relevant. Secondly, they need to assess their service providers and continuously evolve those assessments. For example, with the recent rise of all things AI, organizations need to ask their cloud providers about AI-enabled capabilities, embedded in their cloud services, how they operate, and whether they are trained on the organization’s data.”
