It is very important to review cloud security strategies to ensure that corporate processes and data are truly protected!
The Digital Transformation and the need to adopt increasingly technological solutions to drive the business led to a sharp rise in corporate spending on public cloud services.
According to data from Gartner®, spending on cloud services grew by around 18.4% in 2021, compared to 2020.
Furthermore, the changes brought by the COVID-19 pandemic also impacted corporate IT spending. According to statistics, in 2024, 59.7% of investments will focus on cloud technologies.
Adopting this methodology is already considered the “new norm” for modern companies to drive their business with flexibility, security and reliability.
However, given this new demand, organizations need to be even more aware of security risks that can affect cloud computing platforms to safely and flexibly scale their workloads.
Thus arises the need to acquire and implement scalable security strategies to store corporate data, optimize processes, innovate operations and expand the business according to demand.
In this article, we've brought some recommendations from Gartner® to help companies that want to adopt a cloud methodology in a safe and practical way. Follow the content below:
What is a Public Cloud?
To contextualize the need to adopt cloud computing security strategies, we first need to understand this technology.
Public cloud is a model with scalable and elastic IT resources provided as a service to companies using internet technologies.
What does that mean? In other words, it is a cloud solution with all infrastructure, software and other resources available from the service provider. Thus, companies can access and manage tools through a web browser.
Cloud providers provide appropriate services with superior flexibility for companies to adopt the mechanisms, tools and resources necessary to work with quality, security and reliability.
Why is it important to establish and review security strategies to drive and manage cloud workloads?
These technological solutions, despite practical, innovative, dynamic and full of features, tend to attract hackers, malicious users and cybercriminals.
This means they are susceptible to potential cyber threats that can compromise all operations, leak sensitive corporate data, and other harms to companies.
For public cloud, this is no different. The cloud computing platform is subject to cyber-attacks and intrusions, especially when organizations do not use cybersecurity solutions.
With the advance of online attacks, investing in security strategies is key to “stop” cyber-attacks, prevent potential threats and secure corporate and sensitive data.
How to ensure cloud security?
To promote an adequate security to drive the business, Gartner® has some considerations and recommendations:
"• Assess how the organization defines and prioritizes cloud risks based on industry regulations and the organization's data sensitivity.
• Assess how the organization has defined a set of cloud controls and a unified view of controls across cloud platforms to establish if the organization has the right security controls for the company’s types of cloud risks.
• Review if the organization has created a new RACI chart to manage public cloud risks, formalized cloud security standards, monitoring compliance with standards and cloud activity performance as part of the evaluation on cloud structure governance mechanisms and policies.
• Review how the organization has defined cloud security skills and plans to build a pipeline of talents needed to secure and keep cloud applications to assess if it has a complete strategy to attract and retain cloud experts, which is difficult and expensive."
Gartner® also states that “the main goal of any successful cloud security strategy is to accurately identify all potential cloud-based risks faced by the organization.”
Gartner®, Audit’s Guide to Reviewing the Organization’s Cloud Security Strategy, Audit Research Team, Published 28 May 2021.
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It's also worth aligning the security architecture and cloud foundation, as well as establish enhanced features to meet security governance.
To conclude, we can see that the cloud computing platform is an excellent alternative for organizations that want to benefit from agility, reliability, security and other important features to optimize their business, store corporate data in a safe place and get several other benefits. However, they must have a security strategy in line with the business to reinforce the Cloud's features.
Therefore, implementing cloud cybersecurity strategies to protect processes, tools, documents and information is key for modern companies. Thus, unquestionably, by adopting consistent solutions to drive workloads, organizations will stand out in the market and leverage their success.
