Now that the ongoing worldwide trend toward “going digital” has been accelerated by COVID-19, taking extra precautions to protect your organization’s data, communications and information assets is more important than ever.

Of course, there are many traditional and emerging ways to protect and secure your business: 

  • Employing cybersecurity analysts, auditors or specialists 
  • Implementing a comprehensive communications archiving system 
  • Considering cyber liability insurance   
  • Building a culture of awareness and educating employees on common social engineering tactics used by criminals such as email phishing scams.

However, the chief focus of this discussion will be on protecting your organization by creating and implementing cloud security policies or by updating and fortifying existing ones.

This is essential because, as reported in CIO, nearly all enterprises (96%) use cloud computing in some capacity, with a strong majority (81%) now employing multi-cloud scenarios and strategies.

“Cloud security refers broadly to measures undertaken to protect digital assets and data stored online via cloud services providers,” says Investopedia, which notes that common threats to cloud security include “data breaches, data loss, account hijacking, service traffic hijacking, insecure application program interfaces (APIs), poor choice of cloud storage providers and shared technology that can compromise cloud security.”

Cloud Security Challenges & Concerns

The good news is that the major cloud computing providers (including the Big Three of Amazon, Google and Microsoft’s Azure) invest heavily in providing cloud security to their users. What is crucial to understand, however, is that even though cloud computing itself is considered to be relatively safe, significant risk does come into play in terms of how you, the user, implement safety protocols and precautions on your side of the cloud computing experience.

More on this in a moment, but first, here is a quick review from Cloud Security Alliance and Tripwire (Read more...)