3 Ways to Do Your Due Diligence When It Comes to Cloud Security
Did you know that 2016 had a historic number of data breaches? Each one cost the business breached a significant amount of money. More importantly, these companies suffered damage to their brands. You don’t want your business to suffer the same fate as Equifax. Here are three ways to do your due diligence when it comes to cloud security.
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Hackers will never stop trying to breach your data. They have strong financial incentive to engage in criminal practices. They want to victimize your company, leveraging your vulnerabilities to make money. You must take several steps to safeguard your private documents. The first one is to remain current on breaches.
Tech and business sites alike recount details of breaches. They have experts explain in detail the cause of the incursion. You need to pay attention to any news about data breaches. Once hackers know that a tactic works, they will duplicate it until someone learns how to stop them. By setting up news alerts for business hacks, you will know immediately when something dangerous is in play. With this information, you can act quickly to safeguard your data.
Check and Reduce IT Privileges
You have security protocols in place at your office. Your intent is to make sure that no proverbial weak link exists on your computer system. The problem is that each of your workers has access to your most important data. That’s a needless risk.
You should reduce the privileges of your workers. Only give them access to files that impact their daily work. If they need to work with other data, create a system wherein they must go through channels to prove a need for that information. You’re creating a layer of overhead for your workers and seemingly making your office less efficient. The trade-off is justified because your critical data is only available to people who know your security measures.
Hire a Cloud Access Security Broker
Your IT system has strong security, right? The cloud services that you use for your major IT needs are similarly secure. You may believe that all of your data is safe because of these two facts. Unfortunately, that’s not true.
Your data has to exit your IT system to reach the cloud. Internet protocols connect your computers to the cloud servers. What you may not know is that these protocols aren’t safe. Hackers target these connection points as potential vulnerabilities. They know that the protocols are often generic code that’s susceptible to malware and other malicious coding.
You need to extend your data protection beyond your IT system. A cloud access security broker (CASB) perform provides this service. It gives you control of the entire connection up to the cloud server. Your internal protocols remain in place until you pass security responsibilities to the cloud service, which has strong security measures, too. By using a CASB, you lock down your data in a way that guarantees breaches aren’t possible.
Performing due diligence on your cloud security comes down to understanding where, when, and why you’re vulnerable. These three steps will dramatically reduce the odds of a data breach.
