Cloud Security: Keeping Your Ever-Changing IT Infrastructure secure

Dan Jones (Product Sales Lead) 27-Jan-2022 11:02:56

AWS Managed Cloud Service Azure Managed Cloud Service

One of the most important concerns for businesses today is cloud security.

In October 2021, leading global retailer Tesco had a major cyber attack which shut down its customer-facing services. The press is littered with stories of big-name brands being hacked both private and public.

Any business affected by an attack wants to secure against it happening again, but securing an AWS or Azure cloud platform is different to an on-premise network.

Deploying a cloud-based solution and expecting it to run smoothly without ongoing maintenance and security auditing is a mistake too many businesses make.

Flexibility, scalability, and adaptability are all advantages of the cloud, but those attributes come with rapid change.

As a result, your in house IT team will need to see your security strengths and vulnerabilities as evolving over time.

While you may conduct a yearly or bi-yearly security evaluation of a legacy IT system that are still operational in your business, that won’t be good enough for the cloud. With AWS & Azure, the evolution of security measures should be viewed as an ongoing priority.

Your cloud will also regularly receive updates and patches directly from platform providers like Amazon or Microsoft, instigating even more change.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure clouds are frequently given security updates which address vulnerabilities in the platforms. Therefore, you should have processes in place to check all these updates, and whether they’ve affected your infrastructure in terms of your own configuration and security measures.

Of course, you should have automated monitoring and processes set up, to save time, cost and to conduct regular updates/patches of your own as well:

Patching your infrastructure
Patching/Updating your custom applications
Network security updates
User security (Identity audits)

It should also be emphasised that your security team needs to be proactive when approaching cloud security, rather than reactive.

The most important thing to remember is that cloud security requires you to think far wider and be much more hands-on than any other IT system you've worked with before.

We appreciate all this may sound daunting, but help is available.

For detailed insights into all the different considerations to make when it comes to robust cloud security, read our article here.