Storing your company information and using applications hosted in the cloud is the new normal. Everybody knows that using the cloud brings reliability, flexibility, accessibility, and sometimes, in certain cases, even significant cost reductions compared to traditional on-premises data storage. More and more companies are getting rid of their own on-premises data centers and using the cloud. Multiple software as a service products and custom cloud-native applications can enhance workflow efficiency and improve collaboration between the employees.
However, there is an important question that cloud infrastructure inevitably prompts: if you can access your data in the cloud so quickly and easily, who else might be able to do that? When you decide to start using cloud applications for any specific business purpose, the first thing you need to learn more about is cloud application security.
What does cloud application security mean?
By definition, cloud app security is a set of clearly defined policies, regulations, procedures, and technologies that are used to control any exchanges of information taking place in collaborative cloud environments. Cloud application security is designed specifically to protect your company’s data across multiple cloud environments, since most often a single organization uses multiple cloud services providers at the same time.
You might want to use Google Workspace for one business purpose, and Microsoft Office 365 for another one. Your multi-cloud security policies need to govern every cloud environment that your organization uses, taking into account what security capabilities the cloud provider offers and what needs to be implemented additionally.
Just like the cloud services themselves are very different from traditional on-premises infrastructure, the ways to ensure your cloud application security are not the same as those that are used for a company’s own physical data center. You need to make sure your security team knows the difference and understands what cyber threats exist and what needs to be done to protect your sensitive information.
Cloud application security risks
There are multiple internal and external threats to cybersecurity, besides the most obvious hacking attempts, and your cloud app security policy should be developed with all of them in mind.
Misconfiguration
It might sound trivial, but when your company uses multiple cloud providers, configuration management becomes an increasingly complicated process. Your employees can make mistakes, oversights happen, and sometimes misconfiguration can even be the result of malicious insider activity. As a result, misconfiguration is one of the most common reasons for security breaches.
One of the ways to reduce the number of misconfigurations that affect cloud security is to automate the configuration workflow as much as possible with special tools. Incorporating an infrastructure as a code approach is a good way to mitigate this risk. Using manual configuration procedures leads to misconfigurations occurring much more frequently.
Account hijacking
There is probably nothing that scares business owners as much as black-hat hackers. Indeed, when someone uses stolen credentials or malware to break into cloud user accounts with sensitive information, it is a huge problem for any business.
However, very often your employees inadvertently help unauthorized users who are trying to steal the access details for your company cloud environments. Most of us have seen those funny episodes in movies where an employee keeps an important password on a post-it note stuck to their computer screen. In real life this can cause a security breach with disastrous consequences to the company reputation and profits, which won’t be funny at all.
Your employees should be educated on proper security policies and understand what using generic passwords, clicking links in phishing emails, and not storing credentials properly can potentially mean for the whole organization. Introducing anomaly detection policies can help track suspicious behavior and find hijacked accounts quicker.
Automated attacks
There are multiple technologies that malicious actors use to attack your cloud storage. Bots and automatic scanners can look for known vulnerabilities in cloud services, try to crack passwords using brute-force attacks, and attempt to take down the whole system by overwhelming it.
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, for example, can occur when someone streams huge amounts of traffic to a critical system like a web server, or crafts special requests to exhaust the server resources so that it shuts down and is unable to process requests from legitimate users. Since cloud computing services typically utilize distributed systems and virtualization technologies, DDoS attacks have become even harder to prevent.
Unsecured APIs
Modern applications hosted in cloud environments use application programming interfaces (APIs) to communicate and share data, both internally and externally. Sometimes APIs can turn out to be the only asset used in a certain organization that has a public IP address. As a result, APIs become a potential weak link, targeted by malicious actors, so it is crucial to implement API protection using high-quality encryption and proper access control.
Shadow IT
It often happens, especially in the software development industry, that your employees start using some new cloud applications without your IT department’s approval. Microsoft reports that as many as 80% of employees use applications that might not comply with regulatory and security standards.
Your cloud application security should have the capability to block and sanction cloud access for different types of applications. Keep in mind that some security measures might not be enough when your employees work outside of your organization firewall.
Compliance risk
Depending on the country where you conduct your business, there are certain data compliance regulations that need to be followed. Be it GDPR or HIPAA, if your company doesn’t comply with the relevant data protection requirements, it might cost you a lot of money. But even more importantly, depending on your data sharing practices, your customers’ data might be exposed or handled incorrectly.
The exact requirements of relevant regulations can differ, from having certified cloud service providers only to not using the cloud at all, so it is crucial to research this before you make any decisions involving cloud applications.
Cloud application security options
When you are searching for the best cloud application security solutions, there are lots of options. You don’t have to choose just one cloud application security solution, usually it is possible to use a combination of tools, depending on the options that your cloud provider can offer.
Cloud Access Security Broker
One of the difficulties of using cloud services is not having complete control over all your cloud assets because you can’t access all layers of the cloud architecture. This issue can be solved by using special software that enforces cloud security policies, called a cloud access security broker.
A CASB is located between the cloud consumer and the cloud service provider. It can be used to enforce authorization and authentication regulations, as well as for malware detection and prevention, logging, encryption, and other cloud security policies. It is possible to deploy a CASB not only in the cloud, but also on premises or in a hybrid environment.
Cloud Security Posture Management
Any organization that uses cloud-hosted Kubernetes or other multi-cloud infrastructure as a service environments needs the capability to consistently enforce compliance and security controls, as well as complete visibility. Cloud security posture management solutions can continuously scan and monitor cloud access controls and configuration settings to mitigate security risks.
CSPM tools not only detect and log cloud compliance, security, and governance configuration issues, but also provide capabilities for resource management, analytics, inventory, etc.
Cloud Workload Protection Platform
A very popular cloud strategy is to not use just one cloud service provider but to create multi-cloud environments or combine on-premises and cloud infrastructure. Cloud workload protection platforms help to manage the workload over multiple clouds, maintaining visibility across a multi-cloud environment, unifying security policies, and centralizing cloud management. CWPP tools typically provide capabilities for vulnerability management, system integrity monitoring, host-based segmentation, and so on.
Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management
Gartner’s 2020 Cloud Security Hype Cycle introduced a new category for cloud security solutions, cloud infrastructure management. Cloud providers offer multiple, increasingly complex identity and access management tools, and CIEM solutions provide organizations with best practices for implementing, managing, and enforcing them. With CIEM solutions you can easily control least-privileged access across multiple cloud environments and reduce any excessive entitlement of the cloud infrastructure.
Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform
If you need an integrated toolset that combines the features of CSPM, CWPP, and CIEM, then a cloud-native application protection platform is the solution for you. This cloud security solution category was also introduced by Gartner in 2020. CNAPP technology is a way to ensure complete visibility for the data and control plane of your cloud ecosystem and protect cloud-native applications holistically.
Cloud application security best practices
Although there is no single solution that can magically remove all security threats for the web apps used throughout your entire organization’s cloud, if you follow certain best practices you can improve threat detection and protect your company and customers’ data from unauthorized users who try to gain access to your cloud accounts.
Comprehensive cloud security policy
Security regulations should be consistent to be effective. You might want to dedicate some time to working out a coherent set of security policies, standards, and regulations that will apply to your entire cloud environment.
Regular updates
All the cloud services and cloud-based applications you use should be up to date, especially if you choose a public cloud. Depending on the cloud solution, updating might be as simple as checking the right box, but even if you need to perform some more complicated maintenance, it will be worth it to keep up with all the security updates and patches for known vulnerabilities.
Encryption
You can increase your cloud apps’ performance and improve sensitive data protection at the same time by implementing data encryption. There are three types of encryption you might consider:
- Encryption in transit: data is encrypted when it is passed between users and the cloud system, or between multiple cloud environments. This type of encryption also applies to internal or external communications between cloud services, so malicious actors can’t intercept the passed data.
- Encryption at rest: data stored in the cloud is encrypted. There are multiple application data layers that can all be encrypted, including hardware, database, and file levels of protection.
- Encryption in use: when data is processed, it is at its most vulnerable, so protecting it with encryption is especially desirable. Encryption of data in use is typically combined with role-based access control, IAM, and other security measures that help to keep sensitive data protected.
Automation
Many aspects of your cloud applications’ security, like the attack surface, have to be monitored continuously in real-time in order to make your cybersecurity truly effective. You need to catch any security threats before they impact your customers, and automating your cloud systems monitoring is the easiest way to stay alert.
Automated backups and recovery solutions will make your life easier if there is an actual breach after all. When recovery is automated, your system will be online and working again much faster.
Security audits
You might have the best security team but it is smart to also regularly conduct security audits utilizing specialized tools or even outside security experts to make sure you are ready for any security challenge. Don’t ever think that your system is good enough and can’t be optimized any further.
Conclusion
Cybersecurity breaches can cost your company a lot of money. If we take only ransomware 
, for example, the worldwide losses are predicted to go up to $265 billion by 2031. Moreover, when you lose or expose your customers’ sensitive data stored in your enterprise cloud environment as a result of a security breach, you can lose something even more valuable, your reputation. Choosing the right cloud application security solution is a must for any organization that wants to enjoy all the benefits of cloud computing safely while taking care of customer data properly.
