As companies continue to migrate workloads to the cloud, it’s quickly becoming clear that security strategies need to be re-evaluated and redesigned with these new tools and resources at the forefront. When you’re in planning mode to launch a new Google Cloud, AWS, or Microsoft Azure cloud environment, there are some points to consider to ensure that your organization has a security-first mindset. As the next couple of years progress, we’ll start to identify which companies redesigned their security initiatives to include cloud, as they become the models later organizations try to copy. Here are five steps to take to make sure that your organization stays at the forefront of cloud security.
Build the Importance of Cybersecurity into Your Corporate Culture
For organization’s today who have a strong technology alignment, the CEO, COO, and CTO are going to be involved in cloud decisions, as one decision can have lasting impacts on all departments. When you have executive level buy-in on the importance of not only cloud, but securing the cloud, you will have a much easier time setting up the rest of the organization to have the same mindset. Having a focus on cybersecurity built into the company culture will shape attitudes and actions of individual employees to make sure that everyone is working together to help protect the organization and their resources. With the proliferation of remote work and BYOD policies, it’s important to remember that each employee can be potential cloud security threats. Training them on best practices will set your organization up to minimize the chance that employee oversight leads to security risks.
Develop a Mindset of Reducing Risk
Leaders develop strategies that are proactive, rather than reactive. If you design your organization’s cloud and on-prem security strategy to comprehensively reduce risk, you’re going to be in a better position, because you will have fewer threats and breaches to investigate. You will also find that your IT teams are spending more of their time, and the company’s money, on initiatives that meet business needs, rather than chasing specific threats.
Work to Eliminate Blind Spots
When companies migrate workloads to the cloud, they often discover the cloud inherently has a lot of blind spots. This is due to the fact that pre-existing tools were not built with cloud in mind. And even those that have the ability to work in the cloud, unless they were architected for the cloud, do not work the same across different cloud environments. As a result, it’s very easy to see how organization’s don’t have the same visibility into their cloud resources as they do with their on-prem networks. Using a Cloud TAP, like the one from Garland Technology, can provide that cloud packet visibility needed by IT teams for security or monitoring inspection. Blind spots are the biggest threat to an organization’s overall security strategy. By eliminating those blind spots, you’re going to be in a better position to protect and secure your resources.
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Invest in Your Teams
It’s important to remember to continue to invest in your teams, as they will deliver you the greatest return on investment. The cost of new hires can be extremely high when you add in recruiting costs, time to onboard, training for new employees, etc. Providing current IT teams with specialized training regarding cloud security, and even potentially re-skilling existing teams so they can transfer into new roles is important to consider when you’re looking at who and how you will build and manage your cloud security.
Don’t Become Complacent
Your cloud security strategy should not be a set it and forget it policy. Rather, it should be re-evaluated, tweaked, and updated at least on a semi-annual basis. As business and corporate initiatives change your security strategy needs to change with it. Adding new SaaS products for the marketing or finance departments throughout the year, in addition to other cloud-based monitoring or security tools will change the way the entire cloud strategy is viewed. A semi-annual audit will ensure that your organization’s policies and protocols are being followed to make the best use of your resources.
If you’re looking to position your organization as a leader in cloud security, you first need to make sure that you have visibility into your workloads, whether they’re in Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure, or any private cloud environment. Garland Prisms, is a Cloud TAP that provides a fast and simple way to get the essential traffic visibility needed for security and DevOps monitoring and inspection from any public or private cloud environment.
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