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Confront cloud security challenges with these 5 tips
Security gets complicated when the cloud overlaps with other technologies, such as AI and serverless. Review these common risks, and learn how to prevent attacks.
Every emerging cloud tool and technology creates risks that IT teams must be ready to face. If they fail to alleviate or mitigate these continuously evolving challenges, their data can fall victim to malicious hackers looking to sell sensitive information or hold that data ransom.
To avoid preventable cloud breaches, review the challenges that come with different types of technologies available in the cloud, such as serverless computing or AI and machine learning. Read through these cloud security breakdowns, and learn how they can affect your workloads.
AI presents new challenges when building apps
Although cloud-based AI and machine learning technologies expand capabilities for developers and data scientists, they also introduce new cloud security challenges. For example, these technologies use a wide range of data sources during the development phase, thus broadening the potential attack surface for hackers. IT teams must know the common attack vectors and appreciate how difficult it can be to prevent hackers from exploiting them.
The attacks can be broken down into three categories: data poisoning attacks, model stealing attacks and adversarial input attacks. Cloud admins can implement a variety of strategies to thwart any potential malicious entities from exploiting AI and machine learning vulnerabilities.
Dive deeper into the different types of attacks, and learn how to safeguard your cloud AI services.
Security challenges for hybrid cloud architecture
Hybrid cloud is another approach that complicates security for cloud admins, especially if they are not familiar with this type of infrastructure setup. A company needs to be aware of the challenges it will face when it implements an architecture that links its private data center with the public cloud.
To prepare for cyberattacks, secure these common hybrid cloud vulnerabilities: data transfers, authentication and authorizations, user inexperience, compliance demands and network connections. Once you know the vulnerabilities hackers can abuse, you'll be better equipped to handle any potential challenges.
Review these hybrid cloud security concerns, as well as the tools and strategies needed to help prevent attacks.
Resource misconfiguration is a common cloud vulnerability
Incorrectly configured cloud resources can introduce a wide variety of security risks. In fact, most high-profile Amazon S3 data leaks are due to these types of oversights. Misconfigured security controls are not limited to AWS -- all public cloud environments can fall victim to these types of attacks if the cloud's access controls and permissions are improperly set up.
The first step in mitigating this cloud security challenge is to secure access controls and have authentication methods in place. Without multifactor authentication (MFA), for example, your cloud could be exposed to security risks that were preventable. If MFA is not in place, hackers can grab critical account information and then create resources and new accounts, which can lead to much larger issues.
Explore the strategies for secure cloud configuration, and learn what your responsibilities are in terms of securing your data in a public cloud.
How to address security issues in serverless computing
Serverless computing has a long list of benefits -- principally, not having to manage infrastructure. However, there are cloud security challenges that come along with it. To reduce these issues, you need to secure your code, implement identity and access management, and more.
Serverless environments are prone to coding vulnerabilities, so watch for common problems, such as event injection and improper exception handling. Unfortunately, these coding risks are apparent no matter where or how the code is run, but you can mitigate some of these risks with static code review.
Review these security challenges with serverless computing, and learn about the services that can help alleviate some of the concern.
Educate staff across the business with cloud security training
A company can invest in all sorts of tools and services to address cloud security challenges, but the best tool to fight cyberattacks is a well-trained staff. Even with the right infrastructure in place, a security strategy will fall short if your organization lacks in-house expertise.
As cloud breaches become more common, organizations are looking for ways to bolster their security with a range of technologies. While these strategies can mitigate some risks and concerns, enterprises should also educate and train all their employees in cloud skills -- not just the IT team. This way, the entire staff is prepared for the move to the cloud and isn't blindsided by any new security rules or restrictions.
Evaluate the different training routes your enterprise could implement to ensure your staff is cloud-ready.
