Last year several cyber-attacks were observed that caused
global disruptions to businesses worldwide. These attacks also led to financial
losses and caused harm to organization’s repute. All the past cyber-attack incidences
along with the evolutions in them today, focuses on the need for enterprises to
consider security to protect the data- which is their most valuable asset.
In order to create effective defense, enterprises must
understand, strategize and plan for the risks that are present in the
organization. In case of succeeding in the cloud, enterprises must know their data
that helps a company to identify sensitive data and remove data that shouldn’t
be stored on cloud. It is a good practice for businesses to know the value of
their data in the cloud, as that information can be used to better plan their
cyber security policies. This drives a method behind building a data management
strategy which is robust in order to keep data safe and protected even in complex
cyber threat environment.
To maintain control of enterprises data and achieve
compliance, following are the steps you should pursue for securing data in
cloud environments:
1.
Controlled
access to applications based on cloud
Like other enterprises, you also want to
take benefit of cloud-based Software-as-a-Service
(SaaS) applications, such as Amazon Web Services, Salesforce and MS Office 365,
in order to support employee mobility and for the seamless scalability of
resources to meet growing business needs. You can’t afford to lose confidential
data of your business to unauthorized users. Adopting well-built multi-factor
authentication methods will ensure only approved set of users can access company’s
cloud-based apps.
2.
Encrypt sensitive data wherever it is sent
In cryptography, (cryptography is all about
constructing & analyzing protocols that prevent the public
from reading private messages in a communication) encryption refers to the
method of encoding information in a way that only approved parties can access
it and the un-authorized cannot access them.
If your industry finds more value in data
today than ever before, if you also know that more data is generated, processed
& stored on cloud. You should know that it is more prone to become a prime
target for attackers. Encryption would act like a data shield for all your data
and it will apply security and access controls directly on your data wherever
it resides, even if it moves through the enterprise’s cloud, on-premises, hybrid and virtual cloud environments.
3.
Own, manage, and secure encryption keys
When you have your enterprise’s
confidential data encrypted, it may happen that your team might need a new technique
to manage & store the encryption keys used to protect the information sent
across cloud, on-premises, hybrid and virtual environments. But you also want
to make sure that the control of these encrypted keys stays with you only and not
with a cloud services provider, for that matter not even with any 3rd party
vendor.
A device called Tamper-Resistant
Security Module (TRSM) is a hardware module that provides an extra level
of protection to the encrypted key storage and all the cryptographic actions. The
TRSM also integrates physical protections to avoid compromise of Cryptographic
Security Parameters (CSP). So with this method central monitoring and management
of encrypted keys can be achieved and data in the cloud can be handled by you.
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