5 Steps to Protect Your Cloud Assets

Throughout 2020, we’ve seen organizations rapidly shift their business models to embrace both telecommuting and cloud services. While travel restrictions certainly accelerated these changes, both trends began long before the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s likely that they will continue even after restrictions are relaxed.

To learn how CDW Cloud Check can help you protect cloud data and workloads, read the white paper “Manage Your Cloud Security Posture Effectively.”

Cybersecurity professionals and technology leaders should continue working together to ensure that they meet their security objectives in this changing environment. Let’s take a look at five things that you can do to protect your information assets in the cloud.

Understand the Shared Responsibility Model

Some organizational leaders are under the impression that just because an organization moves its data to the cloud, it transfers all responsibility for information security to the cloud provider. This is false. Cloud providers operate under a shared responsibility model, where they take on some security duties, but customers must continue to protect their data within a cloud environment. Organizations moving to the cloud must clearly understand what responsibilities they retain and how they will meet those control objectives.

Deploy Controls That Meet Your Security Objectives

While we typically want to achieve the same security objectives in the cloud that we do in on-premises environments, we may need to look to different technologies to assist us. We are accustomed to using firewalls to restrict network access in an on-premises environment. In the cloud, we use security groups to achieve that same goal. In other cases, we may need to adjust our use of technologies to integrate them into a cloud environment. For example, we might depend on the same multifactor authentication system to meet our on-premises and cloud security needs.

Enforce Identity and Access Management Requirements

IAM platforms take on an increasingly important role in a cloud-based telecommuting environment. Since we can no longer see people physically entering our offices, we must depend on strong authentication and authorization technology to ensure that they are who they claim to be and that they have the minimum set of privileges necessary to do their jobs.

Implement Host-Based Security Controls

Next-generation endpoint protection becomes even more important in an agile cloud environment. Developers spin up instances rapidly, and those instances must be protected against cybersecurity threats. Organizations should use automation to immediately deploy the appropriate set of host-based security controls to each instance as it is created to ensure that new instances are protected against emerging threats.

Consider Cloud Security Posture Management Solutions

CSPM platforms provide organizations with a comprehensive look at their cloud environments and monitor cloud deployments for ongoing security issues. CDW’s Cloud Check service delivers a complimentary CSPM analysis. Our engineers will work with an organization’s IT and security teams to deploy a CSPM solution, analyze its findings and present clear and customized recommendations for tightening cloud security controls. Many of our customers find this advice so helpful that they choose to continue using CSPM solutions on their own.