5 Key Cloud Infrastructure Security Tips to Help You Build a More Secure IT Infrastructure
How do you secure your cloud infrastructure?
All of us who utilize cloud applications know just how revolutionary cloud computing environments and their respective SaaS product offerings have been for business. But are you paying enough attention to shoring up your organization’s data and infrastructure security? After all, business continuity can only occur where outages and data vulnerabilities are nonexistent.
Your cloud data most likely contains key trade secrets, competitive advantages, and other sensitive data. This is where security controls can help. While the larger discipline of cloud security includes things like firewall protection, anomaly detection, network security, and even encryption, one of the most helpful controls used to ensure your data security is identity and access management, or IAM.
Here are 5 key tips for how to secure your cloud infrastructure from an IAM perspective.
Understand Why IAM is Important
You’re more likely to do something if you know why it’s important.
You probably already know just how significant IAM is in relation to data security if you find yourself here, but we can’t underscore its importance enough, so let’s provide a quick recap: As Rob Macdonald so eloquently put it for TechBeacon, “IAM is the foundation upon which your cybersecurity infrastructure must be built. You must have a comprehensive handle and an unimpeded, always-updated view of the identities flowing across your IT environment.
With IAM, you allow only the right people, devices, and services to get the right access to the right applications and data at the right time. Anything less and your organization faces a considerable risk of suffering a catastrophic security breach.”
With that in mind, here are some key tips to keep in mind when building out a digital resilience strategy.
1. Conduct a Risk Assessment & Gap Analysis
You need to know where you’re vulnerable before you can fix it.
IAM consists of both identity management and access management. So be sure that you’re thinking critically about the users at your organization and the data they have access to – especially mission-critical admins with privileged permissions. You may find that you need to re-tool permissions and change user access.
Thus conducting a risk assessment and gap analysis is crucial in order to learn the lay of the land regarding People, Technology and Processes – the foundations of cybersecurity.
2. Know, Control and Protect Your Assets
Make sure you are managing user access privileges to ensure that the right hands are on the right data.
Map and document your organizational assets and 3rd parties you interact with, so you’re in full control.
Conduct BIA (business impact analysis) for assets and systems.
Hackers know your network and assets well, you should too.
3. Stay on Top of Both Internal & External Threats
Monitoring your infrastructure, applications and data/traffic flow within is key in order to respond to incidents and remediate risks. All traffic and user interaction, internal and external should be visible and analyzed – providing you a clear picture of potential IAM abuse and data leakage.
4. Continuously Test Your Backup and Business Continuity Controls
Business continuity and fast/efficient disaster recovery should be at the top of your playbook these days.
Incidents and system failures of various kinds are likely to occur, therefore it’s important to have your BCP and DRP intact. The bottom line is that business continuity should be tried and tested, throughout the organization.
5. Enforce Policies and Procedures Across Your Organization and 3rd Parties
Your organization should be thinking about IAM and IT security from the top down.
Don’t leave safeguarding your data and infrastructure to chance. Instead, be sure to establish security standards and processes. Hold managers, partners and vendors accountable for the implementation of these policies.
Finally, don’t forget to perform audits regularly as an enforcement measure.
Like a chain, your data and infrastructure security policies are only as valuable as their weakest link.
In Summary
Did you know that under the shared responsibility model, cloud vendors like Okta aren’t legally obligated to protect cloud data? Unfortunately, it’s true. Most organizations think that an SSO service is secure enough, but with breaches becoming more common, that’s really not the case.
That’s where Acsense can help.
Our IAM Resilience solution offers complete protection for your Okta tenant, safeguarding one of your organization’s single most valuable resources – your employees’ digital identities.
