Fortunately, cybersecurity teams don’t need to navigate these waters on their own. Cloud security vendors offer an array of solutions designed to improve the way that organizations manage their cloud implementations and to help identify cloud security issues. Typically, these products directly integrate with other elements of an organization’s cybersecurity infrastructure, providing streamlined alerting, tracking and remediation capabilities. In an era when organizations are increasingly turning to automation to improve the agility and efficiency of their IT teams, this integrated approach is crucial to security in general, and cloud security in particular.

Cloud access security broker solutions often top the list for security professionals seeking to bring their cloud security posture under control. CASBs are policy enforcement tools that integrate with a wide variety of cloud service providers, allowing cybersecurity teams to specify security policies in a centralized location using a single interface and then automatically enforce those policies across the range of cloud services that the organization uses. CASBs play an increasingly important role in the modern Software as a Service–based organization, where teams might overlook the nuances of product-specific security solutions. Through direct integrations with service providers, the CASB intercepts and blocks user requests that would violate security policies.

Multifactor authentication is already an important component of the cybersecurity programs at most organizations. MFA has come into widespread use over the past five years, as phishing, password spraying and credential stuffing attacks rendered simple password-based security mechanisms ineffective. By supplementing passwords with a “something you have” or “something you are” factor, MFA solutions strengthen authentication and provide strong protection against all types of credential theft. Organizations should work with their cloud service providers to ensure that their solutions incorporate MFA and, preferably, allow a direct integration with the organization’s own identity and access management infrastructure to provide additional security and control over user accounts.

Information is the lifeblood of a cybersecurity program. Security information and event management solutions depend on a steady flow of timely, relevant security information to detect and react to unusual activity. Cybersecurity teams are generally familiar with the process of configuring on-premises solutions to report security events to the SIEM for correlation and analysis, but they often run into stumbling blocks when attempting to achieve the same level of visibility into cloud solutions. As organizations evaluate prospective cloud service providers, they should consider the level of visibility they will have into security information to be a key purchase criterion.

Every cybersecurity professional understands the importance of promptly applying new security patches and maintaining secure system and application configurations. Unpatched and misconfigured systems are the root cause of many security incidents, and seemingly minor oversights can have disastrous results. Patch and configuration management is just as important in the cloud as it is in on-premises environments. Organizations can meet many of their cloud patching and configuration management requirements using the same technology they use on-premises. For example, they might use their standard server management tools to maintain servers both onsite and in an Infrastructure as a Service environment. However, some cloud configuration tasks are beyond the reach of these tools and require the use of specialized CSPM solutions.

The cloud brings tremendous advantages to enterprise IT teams, including significant flexibility and agility, along with economies of scale. However, as organizations move to the cloud, it’s important that they understand the impact of that move on their cybersecurity posture and continue to develop a cybersecurity program with the tools, technologies and processes required to support secure cloud implementations.