Authored by Punit Thakkar, CEO & MD, Shivaami Cloud Solution
Understanding cloud security tools and their built-in protections can help ensure the cloud journey is secure and effective. To successfully protect an organization’s data in the cloud, it’s important to first secure users’ identities. Cloud must help block brute force attacks by employing sophisticated risk models built-in the products to assess whether a login event is legitimate or not. If the risk engine determines that an attempt is suspicious then it must ask the user for additional proof to ensure the right user is logging in.
The proofreading shall be done by offering a set of login challenges to the user and asking them to confirm their identity from a trusted phone or in the way of answering a security question.
Cyber criminals launched a wave of cyber-attacks that were not only well-coordinated, but also significantly more advanced than before. Simple endpoint attacks evolved into multi-stage operations. Ransomware attacks have affected both small and large businesses. Cryptomining attacks gave cyber attackers an easy way into enterprise networks. There were a lot of big data leaks, costly ransomware payouts; a broad, new and confusing threat landscape. To assure a more secure login into the cloud, two-factor authentication (2FA) or two-step verification (2SV) were given more emphasis.
Here’s some of the Cloud Application Security Best Practices that must be followed by every user and organization for a more secure login into the cloud:
1.Build application security skills within your development teams: Security teams will be better equipped to ensure application security with high-quality training and competencies. Users can detect if information is being handled improperly by internal users by monitoring user behaviour.
Many organisations employ third-party cloud-based or legacy on-premises SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language)-based identity providers for primary user authentication. Security teams will be better suited to ensure application security if they receive high-quality training and competencies. Shivaami, an award-winning Google partnered company, also provides risk-based login challenges and the 2SV stack with your own IdP (Identity Provider)
If an organization is using a third-party IdP, users can enable this new feature so they can benefit from Google’s strong risk-based assessments and also help reduce operational costs. This increases the overall account security, by leveraging risk-based challenges for users authenticating on the 3rd-party identity provider. Cloud application security tools and practices will continue to evolve, as will the type and number of security threats. With cloud services changing so rapidly, it is important to continuously review and enhance application security best practices frequently.