Cloud computing has offered new horizons to businesses embarking on a digital transformation journey. However, no matter how appealing, it’s also a reason to worry.
With cloud computing, businesses can access crucial information about their organization anywhere, anytime. But this also means that it’s easy for hackers to access and exploit it.
The changing digital landscape of businesses and the adoption of tools and technologies in cloud computing have paced the overall business growth, but neglecting the cybersecurity aspects of the cloud could be fatal.
A recent survey revealed that around 50 percent of the respondents worldwide state that their organization experienced unplanned expenses to fix cybersecurity loopholes due to cloud attacks.
Since there are several myths revolving around cloud computing and its adoption, it’s essential to focus on reality in the form of cybersecurity threats.
Hence, businesses must analyze the risks of cloud adoption and ensure robust security infrastructure to mitigate the risks.
Let’s look at some of the most common cloud computing myths that can cause losses worth millions of dollars to businesses considering leveraging the cloud.
Cloud Computing and Underlying Security Risks
With the global adoption of cloud computing, cybercriminals are swiftly finding ways to sneak into business networks and exploit sensitive data.
Moreover, in the post-COVID-19 world, where remote working became the new normal, hackers could easily bypass weak layers of defense in multiple cloud environments.
Whether it’s business information or customer data, a lack of reliable security systems could lead to financial and reputational losses.
Since conventional security strategies and tools aren’t potent to cover the modern threat vector, analyzing risks and ensuring robust security is the need of the hour.
Hence, designing and implementing a comprehensive security framework before moving to the cloud is the key to protecting your organization, customers, and employees from potential threats.
Now, let’s have a look at some common myths around cloud computing that shouldn’t be ignored by businesses thinking of moving to the cloud.
#1. Cloud Provider Offers Complete Security for Your Cloud Assets
Believing that a cloud provider would offer robust security to your assets could be the most dangerous thing from an information security perspective.
Cloud security involves a shared responsibility model in which two parties are engaged in securing assets stored in the cloud. Here the first party is the cloud service provider, and the second party is the end users, including businesses and customers using the cloud services.
The cloud service provider monitors and responds to security threats to the overall cloud infrastructure. On the other hand, users take necessary steps to protect their applications, data, and other resources by leveraging various cloud cybersecurity tools and technologies.
This means businesses relying on the public cloud shouldn’t believe that they need not worry about cybersecurity best practices since their cloud provider offers security. Having your cybersecurity hygiene is crucial for securing the cloud.
#2. Multi-Cloud is a Synonym for Multi-Layered Security
The rapid adoption of cloud computing has improved the reliability and availability of services but has eventually impacted the overall security mechanism.
Initially, not all cloud service providers offer similar security features. And their behavior, implementation, and configuration vary. Hence, a very complex business environment for the IT team is created that should be appropriately managed.
Also, multi-cloud deployments have increased the risks, and businesses consider multi-cloud environments the most secure form of cloud deployment. However, things aren’t as they seem to be.
Businesses must ensure robust customer identity security for users since multi-cloud environments are prone to identity theft if good security practices are not in place.
#3. Your Organization’s Cybersecurity is Enough to Protect your Cloud Assets
Many businesses believe the myth that their organization’s cybersecurity practices are enough to protect their cloud assets. And this isn’t the case.
Unlike a conventional on-premise server deployment, anyone anywhere in the world could gain access to your organization’s assets stored in the cloud.
Organizations must plan their cloud cybersecurity before inching toward cloud deployment to avoid any breach or sneak. Before moving sensitive information to the cloud, real-time monitoring, compliance, and firewalls must be considered.
Apart from this, measures to encrypt crucial information shouldn’t be ignored since data handling without encryption can be quite risky for cloud environments.
#4. Your Cloud Environment is Isolated and Free from Risks
When we talk about the best cloud infrastructure, the public cloud undeniably is the right choice since it offers the ability to scale quickly with minimal maintenance and investment.
However, invoking the true potential of the public cloud doesn’t mean that your data is isolated and secure against several risks; you can still face a data breach or identity theft.
In multi-tenancy, every cloud user operates with other individuals or businesses; hence, it becomes a cost-efficient way of deployment. But potential savings may sometimes mean compromising security and privacy because each user operates alongside others.
Hence, the security of every individual and business becomes their responsibility. And the ones that haven’t incorporated adequate security mechanisms would surely face data theft and identity exploitation issues.
Businesses need to analyze various threats and vulnerabilities in advance and prepare a security strategy that can help in preventing cyberattacks in a multi-tenant/public cloud infrastructure.
#5. With Cloud Computing, You Don’t Need Your IT Team
Last but not least, many business leaders believe that moving to the cloud would shun the need of their IT staff, which isn’t the case.
The brand’s IT team requires adequate data management, monitoring, and analysis, which helps ensure timely risk management and minimize breach impact.
Also, if any kind of breach is detected, the IT team must locate and contain the source to minimize the loss.
In Conclusion
With cloud computing offering endless business opportunities to global brands, neglecting the threat landscape and cloud vulnerabilities could be fatal.
Brands thinking of leveraging the cloud by shifting their on-premise servers to the multi-tenant or private cloud should ignore the myths and analyze the risks that can hamper their business privacy and security.
Once all the risks are analyzed, the next step is creating a cloud information security policy to help prevent data breaches and identity thefts.
By Rakesh Soni
Rakesh Soni is CEO of LoginRadius, a leading provider of cloud-based digital identity solutions. The LoginRadius Identity Platform serves over 3,000 businesses and secures one billion digital identities worldwide. LoginRadius has been named as an industry leader in the customer identity and access management space by Gartner, Forrester, KuppingerCole, and Computer Weekly. Connect with Soni on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Originally posted on September 6, 2022 @ 5:30 pm
