In recent years, cloud-hosted data has become increasingly popular, with spending on cloud services reaching $178 billion in 2021, a 37% increase from 2020. As more organisations shift to cloud-managed environments, the risk of cyberattacks targeting this data grows, making it increasingly difficult to secure. One major challenge in securing cloud-hosted data remains misconfiguration. Here are some of the reasons why misconfigurations remain commonplace and the best practices your organisation can explore to secure your cloud hosted data.

Why Misconfigurations are Common in Cloud-Hosted Environments

Organisations often move to cloud environments to reduce costs, but without the necessary technical expertise to configure these environments securely, vulnerabilities can arise. This can lead to “quick wins” for cybercriminals, who target misconfigured APIs and databases. Additionally, organisations may choose to forgo traditional IT security support, assuming the vendor will handle it, but the reality is that each organisation is responsible for securing their own data, as demonstrated by the Shared Responsibility Model from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The level of responsibility varies depending on the type of cloud service. For example, a customer using software as a service (SaaS) is only responsible for securing their data, while a customer using infrastructure as a service (IaaS) must secure the data, applications, and operating system.

The Consequences of Misconfigurations

Misconfigurations can have disastrous effects, including data breaches, loss of data, system performance issues, outages, fines, lost revenue, and reputational damage. To avoid these consequences, it is important to maintain proper security configurations in cloud environments.

Best Practices for Securing Cloud-Hosted Data

To ensure your data is fully protected, follow these best practices:

• Set the environment as private to avoid accidental exposure of sensitive data.
• Maintain a backup retention policy, backing up data at least every 7 days.
• Enable encryption at rest to meet compliance standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, and NIST.
• Enable automatic minor version upgrades to keep instances up-to-date and reduce risk.

And so while misconfigurations in cloud environments can pose significant risks, there are solutions available that allow organisations to secure their cloud-hosted data without requiring specific configuration knowledge. By following the best practices outlined above and embracing these solutions, organisations can mitigate the threat of cyberattacks and protect their valuable data.

Imperva Data Security Fabric (DSF) ingests diverse data types and enables security teams to efficiently and effectively overcome the cloud environment configuration challenge when migrating data, workflows, and development to cloud-hosted environments. Imperva DSF monitors all database activity – on-premises and in all cloud infrastructures – 100% of your data repository. Not only does Imperva DSF enable you to see how privileged users interact with the data, but it also attaches metadata to the raw data that enriches it and enables you to secure it more effectively. This helps security teams make better decisions both in terms of the risk rating associated with an event or routing an event through an automated decision tree to be able to arrive at the correct conclusion.

Want to know more about this and other Imperva solutions for your organisation? Our team at DataGroupIT would be more than happy to help you explore the best cybersecurity solutions for your enterprise. Click here to contact us.

About DataGroutIT

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