Time to Set Your Strategy for Complete Cloud Protection
As the year comes to an end, many people begin to think about their plans for 2025. While setting New Year's resolutions for your personal life, why not also make resolutions for your digital environment?
After experiencing a rise in data breaches in 2024, there is little reason to expect a decrease in 2025. In fact, we can expect an increase in all types of digital threats, such as phishing, malware, social engineering, data breaches, denial-of-service attacks, and information manipulation.
Looking beyond 2025, threats to cloud environments will remain a significant issue, especially with the emergence of new technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Post-Quantum Computing.
Discover the Top 5 To Do’s for building secure cloud environments!
Securing Cloud Environments Might Be a Challenge
Cloud utilization has become the standard for organizations of all sizes and across all industries. As a result, protecting cloud environments has become more crucial than ever, with more data and applications being stored and utilized in the cloud. However, as cloud environments diversify, securing them has become increasingly challenging.
The complexity for data security and access control already starts the moment organizations are migrating to the cloud and gets bigger and bigger with each individual customer configuration.
Threats and Pitfalls in Cloud Utilization
Although widely used, cloud infrastructures are often inadequately protected, making it too easy for intruders and increasing the risk of accidental data exposure or loss through employees.
In the following we will talk about the main threats and challenges tied to cloud setup.
Insufficient Access Protection
When it comes to access protection, one might think of how to prevent access for attackers. However, this is just one part of the story.
Utilizing Public Cloud(s), the possibility of accessing your data and applications by the Cloud Service Provider, other tenants, and third parties is always there. Also, due to national legislation like the Cloud Resilience Act (CRA) governments might get access to your data stored in the cloud.
Threats can also arise within your own organization. Ensuring that only authorized employees or contractors of your organization can access specific data or applications is highly important too.
Maintaining Security and Handling Breaches is Costly
This point is not a direct threat to the security of your cloud setup but can quickly turn into one. Every single cloud deployment comes with specific requirements for its protection. For some deployment models, especially private or community cloud, the requirements on your end regarding security maintenance and managing the consequences of incidents are quite high and might even exceed the ones related to on-premises setups.
Not taking these challenges seriously can quickly turn into severe issues.
Fragmented Security
Related to the previously mentioned point of the high costs of security maintenance is the risk of fragmented security. And even if security measures are installed, this doesn’t guarantee complete security. Due to the high cost of persistent security and maintenance, it is difficult to cover and maintain the entire security footprint of your network. The edge of your corporate network, where the on-premises transition to the cloud, introduces new challenges to monitor and protect.
You can compare it to a physical chain. The chain is just as strong as the weakest element. The same applies to your digital environment.
Hence, having security gaps or weak protection measures can provide easy access to your cloud environment to unauthorized persons, possibly leading to huge damage. Therefore, it is crucial to enable strong and complete security throughout your complete digital environment.
Leverage from Strong and Easy to Integrate Cybersecurity
The aforementioned threats provide just a high-level summary and point to the tip of the iceberg. But how can you ensure complete security? And what about the unidentified weak points?
The answer is simple: Utilize the unique advantages of holistic, strong cybersecurity solutions!
Encryption and Crypto Key Management are the Enabler for Complete Cloud Security
To avoid breaches, loss or manipulation of data, effective data protection is the clear recommendation. Encrypting data before storing it in the cloud minimizes risk in the event of a breach, as the encrypted information is unreadable to attackers. The ideal way to do this is with a Hardware Security Module (HSM).
With that, you can easily maintain complete control over your data, including maintaining data sovereignty and ensuring that sensitive information remains under your sole control.
Whenever you utilize HSM-based cryptography to secure your data or any other information, a cryptographic key is generated from a hardware-based security appliance to be used for data encryption and decryption.
To securely store and manage those cryptographic keys, avoiding loss or unauthorized access to them, the utilization of a centralized Key Management System (KMS) is crucial.
Utilizing a suitable KMS enables central storage and access to all your keys through one single pane of glass, whether they are utilized on premises or by the cloud for any use case. This grants you full security and transparent accessibility of all your crypto keys any time and throughout their complete lifecycle.
If you want to learn more about how to successfully combine HSM and KMS capabilities to enable complete cloud security throughout all deployment models, watch our webinar “Discover the Gold Standard for complete cloud security”!
Set the Security Strategy for Protecting your Cloud Infrastructure in 2025 and Beyond
As the threat landscape is further growing, and with 2025 just around the corner, now is the time to secure your digital future.
Every beginning is hard, for sure. But with the right strategy is doesn’t have to be.
Following some easy action points, you can set your strategy right for the complete security for your individual cloud environment.
Navigate your Way to Complete Cloud Security Step by Step
Now that you know which tools to use for creating a robust and reliable security environment, the question is how to set this into action.
To create your individual roadmap, you just need to follow some basic points:
1. Discovery Phase
In this initial step, you are exploring and indexing your cloud environment. Be as specific as possible when listing the different cloud deployment models, access points and user having access right.
This also helps you to uncover blind spots.
2. Evaluation Phase
After having explored your individual setup, you can easily define your security needs and must haves.
There is no standard template and no “one fits all”. The concrete actions are purely depending on your individual setup, and you are the best to know what your needs are.
3. Implementation Phase
After having explored your individual setup, you can easily define your security needs and must haves.
There is no standard template and no “one fits all”. The concrete actions are purely depending on your individual setup, and you are the best to know what your needs are.
Although, there are some table stakes we do highly recommend here which are:
- Introduce strong HSM-based encryption
- Enable central key management and control
- Prepare for future challenges and threats
4. Reiteration Phase
Having executed the first three steps, you’ve set the solid foundation for the secure future of your cloud environment. But nothing lasts forever. Hence, it is equally important to check, review and adjust your security strategy regularly to make sure you keep track.
Discover the Top 5 To Do’s for building secure cloud environments!
