Moving your company's data to the cloud is a smart move for efficiency and scale, but it also brings new risks. When your sensitive information is managed by a cloud service provider, you can't just assume it's secure. You need a clear strategy. This guide covers the essential cloud data protection best practices to help you keep your business assets safe from threats you can't always see.
We'll go beyond the basics to provide IT professionals and business leaders with a practical, no-nonsense guide. We will explore the shared responsibilities, technical safeguards, and strategic planning needed to build a resilient framework that protects your assets without hindering operational flexibility.
Cloud data protection is a collective term for policies, technologies, and applications to secure cloud-based data. Its best practices should cover all stages of data moving in and out of a cloud environment, including long-term archiving and in-transit when uploaded from the user's device.
Organizations use the cloud in various deployment and service models, and cloud data protection helps set the proper controls to ensure data security. This framework is independent of who owns or supervises the network. The main goal is to provide cloud security and safeguard any weaknesses in cloud infrastructure, such as:
Nowadays, it's common for a company to store sensitive data or corporate data in public, private, and hybrid clouds. While this arrangement frees the company's internal IT department from maintenance and the need to set up a physical server, it also exposes a company to numerous security challenges:
You can do a lot to improve cloud-hosted data security. Here are the best industry practices for mitigating cloud data protection risks.
The data center isn't responsible for server security. It just provides a framework on which to build. Usually, it only includes hardware and software for its management. The configurations, however, typically fall on the client.
Your overall security status will depend on both parties sharing the responsibility of ensuring data security in the cloud. It will only work if both parties have clear responsibilities and each carries out its share.
Before shaking hands with a provider, you should look into what tools it offers for remote data and access management. If compliance regulations apply to your industry, ensure your cloud provider has the proper certificates. If you're using an uncertified provider, you may not meet the compliance standards.
Remember to find out everything else about your provider—look for any previous data breach reports and see if your provider's name pops up. The more you know beforehand, the easier it will be to decide.
The more cloud environments you rely on, the more gaps in your infrastructure that malicious individuals could exploit. It's the organization's responsibility to identify these and implement potential solutions.
It's not enough to trust that the cloud provider vendor will take care of everything and that there's no need to do anything else. Implementing additional measures, like Cloud VPN services, will help you control the hosted data and ensure its security status.
Data encryption should be a standard practice for all cloud resources. It's one way of preventing data breaches. It ensures that if someone gains access to the server, they can't read its contents without the private key, enhancing cloud security.
Encrypting files before transfer to cloud storage is also a good practice. In addition, you can fragment your data into shards and store them across multiple clouds. Even if a hacker could access a small amount of data, it would remain useless.
Ensure only the users who need to access the data can access it. Enforce strong credential policies and add additional IP allowlists to allow only specific IP ranges to connect to your network.
Audit your permissions and set your credential lifecycle terms. Avoid password reuse and keep your passwords constantly refreshed to prevent other database dumps from affecting your database's security.
User-controlled endpoints are the most susceptible part of your network infrastructure. Private gadgets used at work or as a part of the bring your own device (BYOD) policy can be a severe threat. They can function as an attack vector to gain entry into your cloud environment.
To prevent this, you should monitor active traffic, restrict traffic on your network perimeter, and restrict what data can exit or enter your systems.
With your cloud-hosting vendor, devising an incident response plan outlining the actions taken after the data breach would help. A written plan will help you react quickly and recover from the shock.
Dedicate some sections to when a data breach occurs to give you additional insights into what should happen when the detection software finds an unauthorized agent on your internal network.
Adopting the right cloud data security measures ensures your company's data privacy and improves network security. Here are the key benefits of cloud data security
Active security risk mitigation. Keeping data outside the company allows one to have a complete overview of what data is going in and out of the server—via active monitoring.
Govern data access. Partition cloud servers can allow specific users into specific servers with varying levels of access rights. Allow better control of who can access what files and which files were downloaded by whom.
Data and security policies. Implementing cloud network protection usually involves an action plan detailing many internal practices. This can often be a good starting point for developing fully-fledged data and security policies to prepare an organization better to withstand any cyber threats that it could experience in the future.
Preventing data loss. Cloud data protection connects to broader data loss prevention. It should have other benefits related to minimizing risks of accidental employee leaks, which could further complicate data access segmentation.
Securing data within cloud environments is fraught with complexities. Here are some key challenges:
Achieve cloud data security by implementing the Zero Trust security model and transitioning to the SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) framework, which uses a cloud framework to deliver network security solutions.
NordLayer provides a flexible network security solution that easily integrates into your current infrastructure. It boosts data and cloud security while facilitating remote work.
Contact our team to discover an easy way to increase the security of your cloud data, no matter where it's stored.
Cloud data security is a broad term for all measures used to protect data within cloud systems. It's the overall strategy. Cloud data protection is a more specific subset that focuses on the practical steps and technologies used to prevent data loss or corruption, such as encryption and data backups. One is the plan, and the other is the action.
Businesses need both for a comprehensive defense. Cloud security protects the entire cloud infrastructure from external threats and unauthorized access, essentially securing the container. Cloud data protection focuses on safeguarding the data itself, ensuring its integrity and availability, even if the container is breached. You need both to secure the system and the data within it.
A common mistake is a misunderstanding of the shared responsibility model, leading companies to assume the provider handles everything. Other errors include poor access management (like not using multi-factor authentication), neglecting to encrypt data, and failing to have a unified security strategy across multiple cloud service providers, which can lead to exploitable gaps.
Joanna Krysińska
Senior Copywriter
A writer, tech enthusiast, dog walker, and amateur pastry chef, Joanna grew up in a family of engineers and mathematicians, so a techy mind is in her genes. She loves making complex tech topics less complex and digestible. She also has a keen interest in the mechanics of cybercrime.
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