Cloud network security refers to the set of practices and technologies used to protect the network infrastructure, data, and applications that are hosted in a cloud environment. This includes security measures implemented by the cloud service provider (CSP) as well as those implemented by the cloud customer.
Some common cloud network security measures include:
Identity and Access Management (IAM): This involves ensuring that only authorized users have access to cloud resources and that their access is restricted to the appropriate level.
Data Encryption: Encryption is used to protect data that is transmitted over the network or stored in the cloud, ensuring that even if it is intercepted, it cannot be read by unauthorized parties.
Firewall Protection: Firewalls are used to block unauthorized access to the cloud network and protect against attacks such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDPS): IDPS solutions are used to detect and prevent attacks on the cloud network by monitoring traffic and identifying unusual activity.
Vulnerability Assessment: Regular vulnerability assessments are performed to identify any weaknesses or vulnerabilities in the cloud network and address them before they can be exploited by attackers.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM): SIEM systems are used to monitor the cloud network for security events and alerts, providing administrators with real-time visibility into potential security threats.
Overall, effective cloud network security requires a layered approach, with multiple security measures working together to provide comprehensive protection against a range of threats. It is also important to regularly monitor and update security measures to ensure ongoing protection against new and emerging threats.
Why is cloud network security important?
Collection of security measures designed to protect cloud-based infrastructure, applications, and data, these measures are important
Now we will see 6 reasons why cloud security is important
Reduce business risk
Once you migrated over to the cloud there is a high chance that a hacker has eyes on your workload, that particular attack can harm your entire business, these bombards and overwhelm can target your enterprise servers, ERP, CRM, Web Server, and Databases. Attack like (distributed denial of service) DDoS with high volumes of fraudulent traffic. Malicious attackers may target time-sensitive data, Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks occur when malicious parties intercept traffic conveyed between networks and external data sources or within a network. But when you adopt cloud network security you reduce risks and cover the most cyber attack
Protect data
As we have seen businesses adopting cloud computing and starting their business operations over the cloud accordingly the huge amount of data being stored in the cloud, that data need an extra layer of security to protect it. cloud data protection is a major challenge in cloud computing we should use a set of practices to secure data in the cloud environment, practices apply to data regardless of where it is stored or how it is managed, that’s why cloud security for data protection reduces the area of risk
Increase Reliability and availability
When you use underlying technology infrastructure you expect the service to be delivered and accessible all the times, both availability and reliability serve as key decision factors in your IT strategy. availability helps you in the percentage of time that the infrastructure, system, or solution is operational where reliability that the system will meet certain performance standards and yield correct output for a specific time. So, you need to constantly keep the cloud services driving those processes reliable and available. Cloud security helps you prevent processes from being deliberately or accidentally corrupted or disrupted
Ensures Regulatory compliance
Cloud compliance regulations are constantly changing and updated to meet the growing demands of information security and user privacy. Adhering to the exhaustive set of cloud compliance regulations, government institutions mandate vastly different measures and policies on cloud computing. These mandates aren’t optional the related fines and lawsuits are not the only implications of failure to compliance. Compliance regulations Lawsuits like HIPAA, PCI DSS, PIPEDA, and GDPR as per different industry verticals increase your chances of staying compliant with these mandates
Reduce Cost
The data breach is common in today's trend if you are using cloud-based hosting, a single data breach costs you much more than the entire cloud operation cost
Indeed, you shouldn’t take cloud security’s importance lightly. That said, I should say the road to a secure cloud environment has bumps and potholes. In the next section, I’ll tackle the top 4 challenges you’ll likely face along the way
Easy to administrate
When you implement cloud security it becomes easy to manage and administrate cloud infrastructure because security measure helps you to reduce extra task, cloud network security tool and practices help you to do your security-related task and notify and react based on security alert
Features
A cloud network security solution should provide an organization with a similar level of security in the cloud as it has in its on-prem infrastructure. To achieve this, a cloud network security solution must have certain key capabilities, including:
Full Network Security Stack: Cloud network security services integrate all of the features required to secure an enterprise network, including a Next Generation Firewall (NGFW), intrusion prevention system (IPS), Anti-Virus, Application Control, URL Filtering, Identity Awareness, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), and Anti-Bot.
Zero Day Protection: To address the rapidly evolving threat landscape, cloud network security solutions should offer protection against zero-day attacks.
SSL/TLS Traffic Inspection: Network traffic is increasingly encrypted, making it more difficult to detect and block malicious connections. Network security solutions must offer efficient SSL/TLS traffic inspection with minimal latency.
Network Segmentation: Network segmentation is essential to minimizing corporate cybersecurity risk and the potential for lateral movement by an attacker. Cloud network security solutions enable network segmentation and micro-segmentation in cloud environments.
Unified Security Management: Cloud adoption expands the corporate digital attack surface and the complexity of security monitoring and threat management. Cloud network security solutions should offer integration with an organization’s existing on-prem solutions to maximize operational efficiency. Ideally, security teams should be able to manage all cloud and on-prem network security from a single pane-of-glass.
Automation: Cloud deployments are dynamic and ephemeral. A cloud solution that does not enable and support automation Any cloud solution that does not enable high levels of automation will be impossible to support and will be abandoned by customers. Legacy security approaches that rely heavily on human intervention cannot scale to meet the volume, velocity, and variety of today's cybersecurity threats, Manual processes are also slow and prone to error. As cloud infrastructure grows and expands, automation is essential to scalability and rapid threat response. Automated cloud network security solutions support rapid deployment, solution agility, and CI/CD workflow automation.
Secure Remote Access: The move to remote work and cloud computing means that remote workers need access to cloud-based resources. Cloud network security solutions should offer secure and scalable remote access to an organization’s cloud-based infrastructure.
Content Sanitization: Rather than completely blocking potentially malicious content, network security solutions should be able to remove malicious, executable content and provide users with access to sanitized content.
Third-Party Integrations: Cloud network security solutions operate within a cloud provider’s environment alongside their existing tools and solutions. CNS tools should offer integrations with third-party solutions to optimize configuration management, network monitoring, and security automation.
Benefits
Advanced Threat Prevention: Cloud network security solutions provide cloud infrastructure with enterprise-level threat prevention. This is essential to protecting cloud-based infrastructure against modern cyber threats.
Consistent Policy Enforcement: Enforcing consistent corporate and security policies across on-prem and cloud-based environments can be difficult due to the significant differences between them. A cloud security solution integrated with existing on-prem solutions enables more consistent security and threat monitoring.
Security Orchestration and Automation: CNS solutions integrate with cloud environments and enable security automation and configuration management. This allows security teams to more quickly and scale manage potential threats to cloud-based infrastructure.
Consistent Security Visibility: Cloud network security solutions that integrate with existing on-prem solutions enable security monitoring and management from a single pane of glass. This simplifies threat prevention, security monitoring, and reporting for cloud environments.
7 Things to Consider When Implementing Cloud Network Security
As the cloud market growing rapidly at so same time there are countless challenges, we can't directly deal with challenges but what we can do is follow the best practices to solve the cloud network challenges
Patch system and network accordingly: it's good practice to patch systems and networks timely so that verbalities can be fixed and there is no exploit on network and system, most cases hackers use the vulnerability scanner to scan security weaknesses in system and network and once it finds by vulnerability scanner application hacker use that point and get access
Implementing access control: Access control ensure that authentic user that is permitted to be there, within your network is authorized to access the specific data that they are accessing, you can use technology like Discretionary Access Control (DAC), Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), PKI, Biometrics and Multi-factor authentication to enforce access control policies
Educate Your Team: Probably the most ignored step on this list, most businesses rarely pay attention to educating their employees despite establishing a secured infrastructure, you end up losing your data. This happens because your employees do not have adequate knowledge. By educating your team members, you can eliminate the risks of malware and ransomware
Implement the security measures: Mistakes can be done by anyone even experience people make mistakes it's better to implement security measures despite harming the network you can install antivirus, take regular backup, install Firewall/UTM, and use complex passwords, to implement such security measures can save you from welcoming big problem
Create an effective disaster recovery plan: Creating a disaster recovery plan save you from a big disaster, make sure you have backup and DR configured for business-critical application
Implementing a firewall: One of the best ways to protect your network is to set a firewall, It keeps your network secure by managing internet traffic coming in and going out of the network, even you can track what kind of communication happening in the network, in advance firewall you get Intrusion detection systems (IDS) and intrusion prevention systems (IPS)
Implementing VPN: Using VPN companies can securely connect their corporate network with their remote offices to communicate and share resources with them as a single network.
Cloud Network security is the backbone of the cloud computing model but in the end, we are the one who shares our data with the cloud providers and it's our responsibility to protect our data because our business ran with this, always follow the best practices and industry-standard, always do POC before using any cloud services review every aspect in term of cost, security and flexibility do it fulfilling your requirement or not, then switch to cloud.
