Improve the Effectiveness of Cloud Assessments and Control Selection for Better Cyber Risk Management

Improve the Effectiveness of Cloud Assessments and Control Selection for Better Cyber Risk Management

A cyber risk management strategy implementation identifies the threats to an organization and mitigating risks. It is a continual process of analyzing, evaluating, and addressing an organization's cybersecurity threats. Addressing resilience risks along with the security risks can mitigate disaster recovery and ensure business continuity. In addition, by knowing the cyber application risks, your cloud service provider can improve the effectiveness of cloud assessments and on-premise control selection. 

A cloud access security (CASB) works as an intermediary between the users and cloud providers that address the functionality gaps in the security practices. Let's learn about it first, and then we move on to the processes and baseline controls. 

Cloud Computing Terms and Approaches for Cyber Risk Management

Cloud computing uses resources such as servers, storage, networking, and software over the Internet. As a result, they are more feasible, fast, productive, and scalable than the local machine resources.

Here are some roles and terms related to cloud computing that a cloud service arrangement involves and the measures to improve cloud assessments and control selection for better cyber risk management: 

CASB

A cloud access security broker, or CASB, is a cloud-hosted or on-premises software or hardware that mediates between users and cloud service providers and is an essential part of enterprise security. It addresses the security gaps across software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environments. CASBs allow businesses to use the cloud safely and safeguard sensitive corporate data saving time, costs and enhancing organizational productivity.

It offers complete visibility of the processes and allows organizations to extend their security policies from existing on-premises infrastructure to the cloud and create cloud-specific policies. The CASB consolidates multiple security policy enforcements and applies to everything your business utilizes in the cloud regardless of the devices (smartphones, IoT devices, or laptops) accessing it.

Cloud Baseline Control

Baseline controls are a set of minimum security controls for low, moderate, or high-impact information systems. These security controls are the initial security control set for a specific system after determining the category of system security. This set of information security controls are established through strategic planning activities to address one or more security categories.

Implementing critical security controls will give your organization insights to:

1. Monitoring of data for cloud applications
2. Cloud baseline security requirements
3. A consistent unified framework for business resilience for addressing disaster recovery, continuity, and reliability linked to cloud and security
4. Legal and privacy considerations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other cloud regulations

Protecting Cloud Applications

Cloud providers are responsible for the infrastructure your organization decides upon for the cloud applications' security and cloud data. Cloud apps' threat detection is different from on-premises as the IP address control won't work with cloud-deployed apps. Thus, your organization needs web application firewalls for securing web applications.

Here, machine learning can help detect user type and behavior that causes an issue and can offer protection measures with much speed and accuracy.

Threat Intelligence

With more complexity in your cloud environment, it becomes more vulnerable to threats. Therefore, there must be a comprehensive solution for your company's cloud service for maximum cloud security.

A dynamic threat intelligence comprising deep intelligence of global and local security events offers solutions obtained by the data collected across the deployment.

Shift-Left Security Approach

Security considerations should be incorporated in the early development process for potential auditing misconfigurations. Enterprises should monitor their IaaS platforms and scan codes before going live to the forum. Integrating security tools with Jenkins, Kubernetes, and others automates the auditing and correction process.

Final Words

Cloud security in today's complex multi-cloud environment is a significant concern. Proper cloud assessments and control selection can mitigate the risks associated and consequently manage the cyber dangers prevailing in the organization. If you know your cloud environment entirely, you can detect threats and remediate the risks.

With the evolving adoption of the cloud, you should judiciously implement cloud security controls to reduce complexity and ensure complete security and cyber risk management—the approaches mentioned above. Assure your organization's readiness to face security challenges while embracing digital innovation in business.