Identify cloud threats and implement best practices like monitoring privileged access and implementing monitoring rules, to maintain a secure environment.
Organizations continue to shift from on-premise to the cloud, making the cloud a hub of sensitive database. One of the major concerns of utilizing cloud resources is ensuring a consistently secure environment. Know your cloud setup to know your cloud threats, thus, manage them more efficiently.
Threats to Your Cloud
If you are strategising for cloud security, there are four areas you must look into:
- Cloud to Cloud: If an attacker has successfully created a breach in one of your cloud environments, it becomes easy for them to pivot to another cloud network within the same infrastructure.
- Among cloud assets: Databases and applications in the cloud can be used against each other if even one is compromised. For example, hackers attempt to gain higher privileges to get access to critical services such as storage or configuration assets. Another possible scenario is trying to compromise an application server to attack its respective, connected cloud database.
- Corporate network to Cloud networks: Trust among internal and external teams of the organization is crucial. A spiteful member may try to use credentials used by an internal DevOps team to gain high-privilege access to cloud systems. Once inside the environment, the attacker can pose to be a severe security threat to DevOps machines and valuable data stored within.
- Cloud to On-premises: A hostile actor can use any number of techniques to compromise a public-facing web app server and use it as a point of attack to capture credentials to back-end enterprise systems. Once access is gained, they may ultimately be targeting an on-premises database. This way, they may look to connect from the cloud back to the on-premises environment.
Tackling Cloud Threats
Empowering security teams is critical to keeping threats at bay. Even more so, in the event of a mishap, the security teams are better prepared to tackle any challenges if the best practices are implemented effectively.
- Monitor Privileged Credentials: Make sure you have visibility into insecure usage and users on all standard software as a service application. Alleviate any hassles caused by users not making use of multi-factor authentication, shadow admins if any, disabled accounts.
- Identify Loopholes: Know your cloud data surface through and though. Locate and eliminate any common attack zones. Visualization and automation are essential for all sensitive database.
