Neelesh Kripalani is Chief Technology Officer at Clover Infotech. He brings 20+ years of extensive experience in the areas of Strategy Planning & Management, IT Services Delivery, Banking implementations, People Management and IT Operations Management. He has been instrumental in developing the Center of Excellence – The innovation hub of Clover Infotech. He is responsible for research and analysis of new-age technologies such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Cyber Security and Cloud Services to understand industry requirements and leverage it for the digital transformation of our customers. As the head of CoE, he also oversees training and development requirement of the talent coming into the Clover Academy – The Knowledge and Training arm of Clover Infotech.
When the pandemic hit us last year, it accelerated the adoption of digital technologies. In a desperate move to adapt to unprecedented changes, organizations frantically moved their business-critical applications and infrastructure to the cloud. Cloud computing was always on the rise due to the considerable advantages that it offered to businesses across all industries. However, the pandemic acted as a catalyst that forced organizations to truly understand the value of cloud computing and the flexibility it brings, leading to more rapid adoption.
According to Gartner, the global end-user spending on public cloud services is predicted to grow by 18.4% by the end of 2021 to reach $304.9 billion. The Cloud’s ability to provide pay-per-use scalable IT environment leads to cost efficiency and ensures business continuity. However, amidst the advantages, the complexity of cloud infrastructure has opened many security gaps for threat actors to explore. Since on the cloud, data is stored with a third-party provider and can be accessed over the internet, the visibility and control over that data is limited.
To be prepared to deal with sophisticated cyber-attacks, organizations need to use cloud-native solutions that have security incorporated in their design architecture. Given how the growing threat landscape jeopardizes the benefits of greater cloud adoption, below mentioned are five tips that organizations could consider to strengthen their cybersecurity in the cloud infrastructure.
Consult with an industry expert – The experience of a cloud security expert can help organizations to improve their security landscape. While consulting, organizations can benefit from industry best practices and build cloud security into the design. Cloud security misconfigurations expose organizations to risky and expensive cloud security threats, which result in grave reputational and financial losses.
Consolidate cloud security tools – Ensuring cloud security is much more complex since there are multiple cloud environments that an organization can choose from. When multiple cloud vendors are involved, maintaining security becomes difficult as it creates multiple access points to the data stored in the cloud. Although every cloud vendor provides security tools, it is very critical to consolidate those security tools so that each security effort is aligned and not functioning in isolation.
Improve Visibility – Visibility is a critical ingredient for not only ensuring cloud security but also optimum utilization of resources. If there’s no visibility into the cloud environment then an organization cannot keep a track of idle resources. With so many different resources running across multiple public and private clouds, an organization needs to Implement a cloud security solution that provides with broad visibility across all cloud environments, and leverage AI and ML to automate threat identification and response.
Implement Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture – Cybersecurity Mesh architecture establishes a more robust and flexible approach to a network’s security by independently securing each device with its own perimeter such as firewalls and network protection tools. Many security practices use a single perimeter to secure an entire IT environment, however cybersecurity mesh architecture uses a holistic approach.
Zero Trust Model – In order to secure all end and access points, organizations need to adopt zero trust model, where all systems, employees, and privileged access are authenticated, authorized, and validated for security. Zero trust model follows the principle of “never trust, always verify”. Hence, this security framework is designed to protect modern environments and enable digital transformation by using strong authentication methods, leveraging network segmentation, and safeguarding privileged access.