There are many benefits to using cloud services to manage your business data. The cloud offers you the ability to grow your business while sparing you unnecessary costs, such as equipment that is expensive to maintain and even more expensive to upgrade.
You have a lot of options when it comes to cloud solutions. Regardless of which service you choose, cloud security is a top priority that should not be overlooked.
Learn what you need to do to improve your cloud security. This guide will cover:
Check Your Setup
One common mistake that businesses make is assuming that the basic, default security settings are sufficient to protect their data. It is important to review every security setting in order to ensure that you are using the best possible setup to protect your organization.
For example, MS Office 365 has a number of security settings that can be enabled and tweaked to best fit your needs:
- Mailbox audit logging – this feature enables you to keep track of user mailbox activity. This feature is very useful if you need to see who accessed an email or when something was deleted. The feature is not enabled by default, so you will need to turn it on to use it. For more information on this feature go to Enable Mailbox Auditing in MS Office 365.
- Data loss prevention (DLP) – this tool allows you to identify sensitive data and create policies around the way your employees may share or access this data. DLP is invaluable for organizations that are required to maintain compliance.
- Customer lockbox – with customer lockbox you have the ability to control how much data is shared when customer support is assisting you. The assisting engineer simply requests access and you have the ability to approve or reject the request. Each request has an expiration time, and once the issue has been resolved the request is closed and access is revoked.
Related: 6 Best Practices for Office 365 Cloud Security
Manage Access
More and more businesses are being affected by data breaches every year and the size and costs of these breaches are only increasing. There is one key way that you can protect your business from breaches and decrease the cost, should a breach occur: manage access.
Restricting access also has the benefit of limiting the possibilities of misconfiguration, which is a surprisingly common method for criminals to gain access to a company’s data.
- Multi-factor authentication (MFA) – When your password is entered incorrectly or entered from a new location, MFA will require that you acknowledge a notification before allowing you to continue logging in. This extra step ensures that your accounts remain protected, even if your password is compromised.
- Restrict administrator access – It is extremely important to restrict access to the accounts that manage your Microsoft Azure subscription. Compromising these accounts eliminates all other security measures.
- Restrict user access – Microsoft Azure offers role-based access control (RBAC) to assist with limiting user access to only the needed functions. This setting will limit the damage of a data breach via an inside job or the possibility of an employee accidentally exposing data via carelessness such as losing a laptop.
Related: 7 Important Cloud Computing Stats and Why They Matter
CyberSOC
Remote Security operations centers (SOC) are an attractive and increasingly affordable option. With dedicated security engineers on staff and around the clock protection, SOCs like Arctic Wolf Cyber SOC manage your cloud security using a full spectrum focus on prevention, detection, and response.
AWN CyberSOC Service Capabilities
This service allows you to focus on your business and lets security experts focus on keeping your business safe. Whether you need basic security, cloud monitoring, compliance assistance, or incidence response and crisis support, their SOC is equipped to help you with your security needs. They also make it easy to access reports of your log data or even analysis, with optional retention for 5 years or more.
Cloud Monitoring
Cloud monitoring is a very useful service that provides comprehensive visibility regarding your cloud resources. The purpose of cloud monitoring is to ensure that your cloud services are working properly, to monitor for attacks, and to ensure that users comply with security policies.
Cloud systems, by nature, are especially vulnerable to threats such as unauthorized access and data loss:
SOC cloud monitoring uses APIs to provide near-real-time monitoring of your cloud resources and user activity. One great option for cloud monitoring is Arctic Wolf cloud security.
The AWN security solution provides:
- 24x7x365 continuous monitoring to ensure business information uploaded to SaaS applications and infrastructure workloads on IaaS services remain safe
- Single pane of glass across attack surfaces and common incident response framework to centralize monitoring and correlate attacks across network infrastructure and data in cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments, including SaaS applications, Active Directory, FW/IDPS, endpoints, email, switches, wireless APs, cloud workloads and more
- Effective low-noise threat detection via the Concierge Security team that sets customized rules to limit false positives from native events and identify threats specific to your environment and business
- Regulatory compliance for PCI DSS, HIPAA, and SOX with expert support and custom and pre-defined reporting
In Conclusion
Cloud security is not something you should take lightly. Your best chance for protecting your data is to partner with an expert cybersecurity provider who offers comprehensive solutions from vendors like Arctic Wolf. With your data in expert hands, you’ll have peace of mind knowing your business is safe and secure.
