In cloud computing, every component is online, which exposes potential vulnerabilities. Even the best teams suffer severe attacks and security breaches from time to time. Since cloud computing is built as a public service, it’s easy to run before you learn to walk. After all, no one at a cloud vendor checks your administration skills before granting you an account: all it takes to get started is generally a valid credit card.
Best practices to help you reduce cloud attacks
- Make security a core aspect of all IT operations.
- Keep ALL your teams up-to-date with cloud security best practices.
- Ensure security policies and procedures are regularly checked and reviewed.
- Proactively classify information and apply access control.
- Use cloud services such as AWS Inspector, AWS CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, and AWS Config to automate compliance controls.
- Prevent data exfiltration.
- Integrate prevention and response strategies into security operations.
- Discover rogue projects with audits.
- Remove password access from accounts that do not need to log in to services.
- Review and rotate access keys and credentials.
- Follow security blogs and announcements to be aware of known attacks.
- Apply security best practices for any open source software that you are using.
- Again, use encryption whenever and wherever possible.
These practices will help your organization monitor for the exposure and movement of critical data, defend crucial systems from attack and compromise, and authenticate access to infrastructure and data to protect against further risks.