This guest blog was contributed by Taylor Hersom, Founder and CEO of Eden Data
The trend toward cloud migration has been on the rise for the past ten years or so, but the COVID pandemic's surge in remote work has increased the need for cloud-based services geared toward businesses. Additionally, many companies now have multi-cloud and dispersed systems for edge computing power when there was formerly a single cloud service.
Although cloud service companies take every precaution to keep their services safe, unfortunately, breaches do happen often. Misconfiguration is one of the most common forms of breaches, whereby there is an ineffective application of controls to a cloud-based service or system. Over 60% of respondents in a Statista survey identified incorrect setup or misconfiguration of the cloud platform as the main security hazard in public clouds from 2019 to 2022.
No matter the size or reputation, breaches via cloud misconfiguration can affect any business. And it's not just the anticipated high-value information, like credit card numbers or social security numbers, that are at risk. If a hacker has access to simple information like names, addresses, and email addresses, they can do a lot of damage.
So how can you protect your business by identifying breaches early and prevent disaster? Let’s take a look at the necessary steps.
Understanding the agreement with the cloud provider
Issues with cloud service setup might occur very early in the adoption process for no other reason than that businesses may not fully comprehend what their responsibilities are. The distribution of duties between the supplier and the client typically relies on whether the provider offers Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).
The 2019 attack on Capital One was arguably the most well-known breach of Amazon's cloud services. Over 100 million consumers' personal data were affected by the incident, including highly private data like social security numbers, credit card numbers, and credit ratings. It came about as a result of a misconfigured firewall from Capital One, which is something that can happen during setup. It was also later discovered that an AWS engineer broke into customers' cloud storage accounts and stole their data.
Automation and API defaults
Security teams sometimes struggle to keep up with DevOps teams' lightning-speed of creating and delivering apps on a daily or hourly basis. Automating and enhancing their job is one method they may do this. Automation and augmentation are made easier with the use of software-defined infrastructure (SDI), infrastructure as code (IaC), and current templates and containers.
Ensure that any cloud services and applications you use have default configurations known to your IT department. There are different defaults, settings, and service level agreements for every cloud provider (SLA). This enables you to spot possible security holes in cloud infrastructures and implement procedures or tools to close them. you can build the appropriate audit provisions, reporting processes, and incident response protocols to swiftly detect any possible risks if you have an end-to-end understanding of your cloud security.
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