How to Ensure Cloud Hosting Security in 2021
By: Shane Barker
Tags: Hosting, Vps Hosting, Security, Cloud, Development

How to Ensure Cloud Hosting Security in 2021

Looking for some tried-and-tested ways to ensure cloud hosting security in 2021? Read this post to find seven of the most effective ways to achieve that goal. Shane Barker Follow Dec 23, 2020 · 6 min read

According to a recent report by McAfee, the total number of threats to cloud services increased by 635% in 1Q20. With more people working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of cloud services has increased and the same applies to threats as well.

As the use of cloud services increases over time, it will become increasingly more important to secure your cloud from cyber attacks. However, doing that is easier said than done.

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So, how can you ensure cloud hosting security in 2021?

Well, that’s what this post is all about. In this post, you will learn seven effective ways to make your cloud hosting environments more secure and protect your data effectively.

Ready to learn more?

Let’s get started.

1. Optimize Your Access Management

One of the biggest threats to cloud security comes from poor access management and controls. Improving your access controls is the first step towards securing any cloud services. Not everyone should have equal access to your tools and software for business, data, and other resources.

However, if you want to further improve your security, you can opt for Privileged Access Management (PAM) and Identity & Access Management (IAM) systems.

Privileged Access Management

This system is based on the concept of providing the least privilege access to users. Basically, give the bare minimum access to people to enable them to perform their tasks and duties.

This way, you can secure your sensitive data by providing access only to authorized personnel. You can also use multi-factor authentication to further improve security. Also, create time-limited specific admin roles that provide access for a limited time just enough to perform certain tasks.

Identity & Access Management

This is another commonly-used access management system that assigns unique identities to each user. Each user has a specific role and access to relevant data and tools within the organization.

Overall, the goal of IAM is to provide access to the right resources to the right people and ensure that not everyone has access to everything. This, essentially, limits access to sensitive information as only authorized users can see that information.

2. Encrypt Your Data

This is security 101 for anyone who wants to secure their data from cyberattacks. You should use good encryption to protect your data. For this, you can use customer-controlled keys to secure your data.

Also, don’t just encrypt your data when transmitting, but encrypt your data-at-rest as well. This will further solidify your defenses against cyber threats. It is necessary to protect the data stored in the public cloud.

You should also ensure consistent encryption across all resources in the public cloud and regular encryption key rotation. However, doing this manually is a complex task and, therefore, you need automation to make this process more efficient.

You can use key management systems provided by any of the top service providers for this purpose.

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3. Leverage Zero-Trust Security and Micro-Segmentation

Use zero-trust security and micro-segmentation when configuring your cloud infrastructure. Zero-trust network access is similar to PAM in that access to resources is provided in a least-privileged manner.

So, there is no inherent trust, and access is not granted based on trust, but on a need-to-know basis.

Microsegmentation helps create isolated data centers in cloud environments where you can give access to different segments to different users. Microsegmentation basically helps with access management and helps you restrict access to certain types of data or resources.

4. Set a Process for Identifying and Correcting Configuration Errors

Cloud infrastructure configuration errors can be a big risk if they go undetected and unchecked. So, make sure that you conduct regular audits or have a process in place to identify and correct these errors.

Cloud security posture management tools can help you with this endeavor. These tools continuously scan for and identify incorrectly configured cloud resources. After that, they also trigger real-time remediation actions to fix errors.

This whole process ensures that configuration errors are detected and fixed in a timely manner. This, in turn, strengthens your cloud hosting security.

5. Create Frequent Data Backups

One of the common challenges faced by any cloud hosting provider is the loss of data. These losses can happen due to data alteration, loss of access, data deletion, unreliable storage medium outage, etc.

However, the damage from such data loss can be minimized, if not completely avoided, by doing frequent data backups. Frequent backups ensure that your data is safely stored even if it somehow gets deleted from the cloud.

You will need to determine which data needs to be backed up and use an automation tool to make this process more efficient.

6. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to Protect from DDoS Attacks

A CDN saves the most-used data as a cache on a network of servers distributed worldwide. So, when someone requests access to this data, the CDN delivers this cached data from the nearest server. This makes the whole process much faster.

However, it does a lot more than that. It also protects your data from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Such attacks flood a site’s servers with tons of access requests until the servers crash. A CDN can tackle this flood of requests in a sophisticated manner, protecting your system from DDoS attacks.

Excited to learn some more cloud security trends and best practices?

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7. Invest in SIEM and Cloud-Native Threat Detection Tools

Security information and event management (SIEM) and threat detection tools can help you detect anomalies and threats in a timely manner. These provide real-time monitoring and detection of threats to protect your system from any threats.

Use a unified log approach and collect all logs using enterprise SIEM tools to increase visibility and rescue risks. Consolidating all log sources helps with easier detection of anomalies.

Conclusion

There are many pros and cons of using cloud platforms, but security is probably the biggest risk. However, with the right precautionary measures, you can ensure the safety of your cloud platforms.

These are seven of the most important cloud security tips and best practices that you should follow in 2021. Use these to keep your data and resources safe and secure from any cyberattacks.

Do you have any questions about this topic or want to share some more insights on how to ensure cloud hosting security? Share your thoughts and questions by leaving a comment.

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