3 Steps to Bolster Your Cloud Security Management

3 Steps to Bolster Your Cloud Security Management

Seizing the opportunity to leverage the power of cloud is an achievement, but it’s just one piece of a bigger cloud computing puzzle. To fully realize everything that cloud has to offer, an organization must have the capability and dedication to ensure that their cloud environment is secure. Here are three steps that can help any organization improve their cloud security management.

Step 1: Assess your cloud environment for potential weaknesses

The first step is assessing your organization’s cloud environment and flagging potential areas of weakness. During the assessment, ask ‘What security measures do we have in place? How are they deployed? Where are they deployed?’ and ‘What features do those measures have to stop a cyberattack?’ Many cloud solutions have native tools to determine if a cloud environment is configured correctly. These commonly ignored tools are a great place to begin hardening your cloud environment.

It’s not uncommon for teams to suffer from alert fatigue, and it may be tempting to ignore alerts from cloud providers. Unfortunately, this reduces an organization’s ability to see an indicator of compromise that normally precedes a ransomware event – making them reactionary. Your business wants to be proactive and take the necessary steps to save yourself countless headaches in the future.

Step 2: Fill the gaps

Now that the assessment is complete, it’s time to address any discovered weaknesses. Hardening the cloud environment may take advantage of new technology, procedures or partnerships to solve identified gaps. New technology should balance providing the best security solution with ease of use, implementation and cost. No company has a completely homogenous environment, so be open-minded and willing to assess and deploy different technologies to improve security posture. New procedures might be challenging to implement at first, but in the long run can prove to be well worth the investment.

Finally, if you do not have the bandwidth to solve the problems you uncovered, you should consider a new partnership with a managed service provider (MSP) – where they proactively monitor and manage your environment so you can focus on your desired business outcomes.

Step 3: Weave cloud security into company culture

After the cloud security issues have been addressed, work on weaving cloud security into company culture. Keeping security at the top of your employees’ minds can make a huge difference.

Consider setting up security tests and webinars. If your organization has a company newsletter, include best practices that employees can use. Make it a point to the entire organization that security is at the top of your company’s priorities. Over time, employees will adopt that same way of thinking, and security will be at the forefront of their day-to-day interactions.

After completing the above steps, your organization will have bolstered its cloud security management – making any CXO happy with their company’s security posture. Visit our website for more information on our Security Risk Management and Compliance Services.