A cloud security assessment is a process in which security professionals assess the security of an organization’s cloud infrastructure. A cloud-based application’s security assessment looks at the security controls in place. However, it will also determine whether the controls are appropriate for the specific use cases for which the application is designed.
Cloud assessments are especially important for organisations that are planning to migrate to or are already using the cloud. Migrating business assets to the cloud is a significant undertaking, and it is critical to implement adequate security controls to protect data.
A critical component of this process is conducting a security assessment of your current and future cloud deployments.
Why Are Cloud Security Assessments Necessary for Businesses?
The recent shift to remote work has resulted in a significant increase in the number of businesses migrating to the cloud and utilising cloud-based infrastructure. As a result, businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to effectively protect their data across multiple cloud environments using only network security measures.
Many businesses require a cloud security assessment to determine where they are vulnerable in order to ensure that their sensitive data is protected and secure from potential threats.
One of the major benefits of a cloud security assessment is that it helps businesses understand how their sensitive data is accessed and shared. Another significant advantage is that it allows businesses to test their existing cloud security configurations.
One of the most common sources of potential security issues is your cloud service configurations (or misconfigurations).
No matter if you use well-known third-party cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or your own proprietary technology, a cloud security assessment will find weaknesses in technology and processes that could compromise sensitive information or cause you to violate compliance standards.
As you can see, by conducting a cloud security assessment, businesses can test their current security solutions and configurations to see if they are capable of adequately protecting against cyber threats, thereby assisting them in avoiding regulatory fines and protecting their sensitive data.
5 Key Steps to Performing a Cloud Security Assessment Checklist
Before beginning your cloud readiness assessment, gather all relevant information about your cloud environment.
This includes details about your:
- Cloud service provider (s)
- Any third-party vendors you use
- In addition, what are your current security solutions and configurations?
Here are the five key steps to creating a comprehensive cloud risk assessment checklist to supplement your primary cloud assessment tools:
Step One: Identify Your Assets
Identifying all of the assets stored in your cloud environment is the first step in performing a cloud security assessment. Everything from customer information and financial records to employee credentials and trade secrets is covered.
Step Two: Classify Your Data
Once you have identified all of the assets stored in your cloud environment, you need to classify them according to their sensitivity. This will help you to determine which assets are most at risk and need to be better protected.
Step Three: Identify Your Threats
The next step is to identify any potential threats to your sensitive data. This includes external threats such as hackers as well as internal threats such as malicious insiders.
You should also thoroughly test your cloud infrastructure to determine how easy (or difficult) it is for external threat actors to gain unauthorised access to your data. This will necessitate double-checking all of your configurations to ensure no exploitable flaws exist.
Cloud threat and penetration testing should be performed by experts who are familiar with attack vectors and have the tools needed to simulate attacks in your environment.
Step Four: Evaluate Your Risks
After identifying potential threats to your sensitive data, you must assess the risks associated with each one. Consider both the likelihood of a threat occurring and the impact it could have on your business.
Step Five: Implement Controls
After assessing the risks associated with each threat, you must put in place controls to mitigate them. Technical controls such as firewalls and encryption are included, as are non-technical controls such as employee training and incident response plans.
You can perform a thorough cloud security assessment of your environment and identify any potential risks, vulnerabilities, and security challenges by following these five steps. You can then take steps to correct them and ensure that your data is properly safeguarded.
Steps for closing cloud security gaps may include:
- Increasing Security Controls
- Access Control Restriction
- Conducting Extensive Penetration Testing
- Patch Configuration Update
- Firewall Updates
- User Data/Traffic Logs Monitoring
- Reassessing Your Current Cloud Strategy
What are the Benefits of a Cloud Security Assessment?
A cloud security assessment provides organisations with the assurance that their network and assets are properly configured, adequately secured, and not under attack. The evaluation will identify points of access or other weaknesses within the architecture, as well as detailed recommendations to help strengthen defences and improve capabilities in the future, by reviewing the organization’s network history.
Specific benefits of a cloud security assessment include:
- Reduced risk of accidental misconfiguration: The organisation can reduce its attack surface in the cloud environment by implementing the tailored configuration changes recommended as part of the cloud security assessment.
- Reduced risk from missed notifications: The recommendations of the cloud security assessment team can improve an organization’s ability to detect and respond to compromise, preventing a minor issue from becoming a full-blown breach.
- Improved resilience: The team performing the cloud security assessment will make recommendations to assist organisations in recovering from a breach as quickly as possible.
- More efficient account management: Organizations with less-than-optimal identity architectures can save time on account and privilege management while reducing the likelihood of inadvertently granting excessive privileges.
- Past compromise detection: While a cloud security assessment is not a comprehensive cloud compromise assessment, it can identify deviations from the norm in the organization’s cloud configuration that could have been caused by compromise.
Conclusion
Cloud infrastructure has already become a critical component in ensuring the global digital world’s rapid development. The reliance of projects on their cloud infrastructure will grow rapidly. As a result, projects that prioritise cloud security today are likely to gain a competitive advantage over other companies in the future, because the risk that malicious actors will compromise data belonging to their users after cloud security assessment is very low. However, it is critical for businesses to select a reputable provider of cloud security assessment services.
