Every day, cloud security threats to your business are becoming more complex, sophisticated and difficult to detect. With 77% of cyber-attacks in 2017 involving the use of file-less malware and exploits to compromise data and/or infrastructure, it’s now more important to ever to ensure that your business’ cloud applications are secure.
Here are four ways that you can improve your business’ cloud security.
Authorisation
Ensuring your employees only have access to the data necessary to performing their business functions can help mitigate a large amount of risk for your business. Creating different access permissions within your organisation can help make sure that if one of your employees were compromised, there’s a smaller chance that the hacker would gain access to all of your customer and business data.
Layered Security
Going for a single crown jewels approach to your business’ cloud security can be good, but why take it for granted? Even Medieval Lords and Ladies knew not to rely on just the security of their castle gate, often creating a multi-tiered defence, including high walls, moats and ramparts, so that if one layer is penetrated, not all is lost.
The same principle applies for your business’ cloud security. Whilst an all-in-one application can protect your business enterprise, if it is compromised, your business will be left unprotected. In total, there are six layers to consider when securing your cloud applications:
- Human– teach people to spot scams and be careful when storing and sending important information.
- Physical– ensure your physical assets are protected from theft or damage.
- Endpoint– protect devices from running malicious programs that could jeopardise data security.
- Network– secure connections between computers. Monitor entry and exit points, encrypt communications, and keep an eye out for anomalies.
- Application– test applications to ensure they don’t provide avenues for attacks.
- Data– ensure that only the right people all have access to the right data at all times.
Authenticate
The traditional username/password combination is no longer good enough way to authenticate who is accessing your applications. Of 10 million compromised accounts analysed in a recent report, it was found that just 25 passwords made up more than half of the list.
To ensure that your business remains safe in the cloud, it’s not only important that your employees are using unique, secure passwords, but are also utilising two-factor authentication. Using two-factor authentication can be an effective way to make sure that users are who they say they are and adds an additional layer of protection around your logins.
Build Your Firewall
As the major line of defence against cyber threats to your organisation, your firewall needs careful configuration and a high level of ongoing maintenance. Whilst many cloud applications offer robust security, more additional cloud security measures can be applied to your applications, to provide extra peace of mind and help your business’ cloud security.
As cyber threats become more sophisticated we advocate a layered security approach to improve your business’ cloud security. We recommend the Fortinet Security Fabric, which delivers broad protection and visibility to every network segment, device, and appliance. Applications today are everywhere, and securing applications at the stack is now the new perimeter. Fortinet’s next-generation security solutions deliver comprehensive protection for your business.
How we can help
As experts in cloud security, and a Fortinet Platinum partner for many years, we can install, configure, monitor and manage upgrades to your organisation’s firewall, ensuring it’s providing the maximum defence for your cloud applications.
Get in touch with one of our expert cloud security consultants today