What is Cloud Computing Security?
Cloud computing security is an aspect of cybersecurity focused on the security of cloud environments. Cloud deployments differ significantly from on-prem ones since the organization lacks control over the underlying infrastructure and shares security responsibility with a cloud service provider. As a result, cloud environments have unique security concerns and can require specialized security tools and controls.
As organizations move more data and applications to the cloud, cloud security becomes increasingly important. Organizations will need modern cloud security solutions to ensure that their cloud-based resources are properly protected against top threats.
Why Cloud Computing Security Matters
Cloud environments make up a growing percentage of corporate IT infrastructures due to digital transformation and remote work. As a result, cloud security is an increasingly important element of an overall cybersecurity strategy. Companies need cloud security processes and tools to manage misconfigurations, shadow IT, limited visibility, and other top cloud security challenges.
Unique Cloud Risks
Cloud environments differ substantially from on-prem deployments since an organization is working within its provider’s environment rather than on its own infrastructure. This introduces unique cloud security concerns, such as misconfigured storage, credential theft, and exposed APIs.
The Shared Responsibility Model
Another major challenge of cloud security is the cloud shared responsibility model, which breaks down how responsibility for security is divided between the cloud customer and cloud provider. The exact breakdown depends on the cloud model in use (SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS) and the details of the provider’s environment.
The cloud shared responsibility model is a common source of cloud security challenges since misunderstandings can lead to security gaps. Additionally, the nature of cloud infrastructure means that cloud customers may not be able to use the same tools as they would for an on-prem environment, increasing security complexity.
Regulatory & Compliance Pressure
A corporate cloud security program may be driven by external factors as well as internal ones. Organizations subject to regulations such as the GDPR or HIPAA need to be compliant in all of their computing environments, not just on-prem.
Complex cloud environments can complicate compliance since an organization may need to monitor and secure data across multiple environments. Additionally, cloud customers may need specialized security solutions, such as cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools, to address the top threats to security and compliance in cloud environments.
Core Pillars of Cloud Computing Security
A cloud security strategy should address all major risks to a cloud environment and should implement security best practices, such as defense in depth and a zero trust architecture.
The main pillars of a cloud computing security strategy include:
Data Protection
Many companies’ most valuable resource is their data, and data protection is a critical component of a cloud security strategy. In most cases, this involves implementing data encryption wherever possible.
Encryption is typically applied to data at rest and data in transit. For example, an organization may encrypt files in cloud storage and use TLS to protect data in transit. This helps to protect against eavesdropping and malicious modification by an attacker.
For data in use, cloud providers have begun offering confidential computing to enhance security. This includes the use of secure enclaves, confidential virtual machines (VMs), and trusted execution environments (TEEs) to prevent unauthorized access to data while it’s being processed.
Identity & Access Management
Identity and access management (IAM) is critical to differentiating between legitimate use and potential attacks. If an organization has implemented strong authentication — including multi-factor authentication (MFA) — and least-privilege access, it can be confident that users are who they claim to be and can’t access anything that they shouldn’t.
Cloud environments commonly take advantage of federated identity to link to on-prem environments. This is when two IAM providers trust one another to authenticate users, eliminating the need for users to have separate sets of credentials for each environment.
Network & Perimeter Security
The cloud has been a key player in the dissolution of the traditional network perimeter as corporate data and applications have moved off-prem. However, securing access to both on-prem cloud environments and resources is still important to corporate cybersecurity.
In cloud environments, where a traditional perimeter doesn’t exist, companies need security solutions to control access to apps and data accessed via the public internet. These include technologies such as cloud firewall, Secure Web Gateway (SWG), and Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) solutions designed to address key cloud security challenges.
Posture Management & Visibility
Companies commonly struggle to achieve full visibility into cloud environments, where they don’t own the infrastructure and resources may be distributed across multiple providers’ platforms. Additionally, shadow IT and confusion about the cloud shared responsibility model and an organization’s security responsibilities can lead to dangerous misconfigurations in the cloud.
Solutions to these issues include cloud security posture management (CSPM) and cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) solutions. CSPM offers visibility and misconfiguration detection in cloud environments, while CWPP focuses on the security of applications and cloud-based workloads.
How Cato Networks Secures the Cloud
The Cato SASE Cloud Platform converges security and networking capabilities within a single, cloud-native solution. This enables organizations to deploy key cloud security controls for cloud environments without negatively impacting availability and performance.
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) & SSE
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) integrates security and network capabilities, combining Security Service Edge (SSE) with Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN). The Cato SASE Cloud Platform offers a single-pass architecture that is more efficient and high-performance than a collection of point security products. Additionally, SASE’s Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) offers more granular access management than traditional VPNs for remote access.
Integration with Cloud Workloads and Apps
The Cato SASE Cloud Platform simplifies the protection of SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, and private cloud environments by implementing security controls at the network level. With in-depth visibility into network traffic, an organization achieves comprehensive visibility, threat prevention, and policy enforcement across on-prem and cloud environments. Additionally, native integrations with third-party solutions offer expanded capabilities and more centralized security management.
Unified Policy & Threat Protection
Organizations commonly struggle to consistently enforce security policies in the cloud, especially in complex, multi-cloud environments. Cato’s centralized policy control addresses this issue by ensuring consistent visibility and policy enforcement across all environments while minimizing the overhead associated with policy management.
The Cato SASE Cloud Platform also offers enterprise-grade threat prevention via real-time analytics and leveraging Cato’s global threat intelligence. Behavioral detection, data loss prevention (DLP), and anti-malware capabilities are all built into Cato’s single-pass engine to provide broad protection with minimal performance impact.
Comparing Approaches
By definition, SASE only requires a solution to offer a particular set of capabilities within a cloud form factor. As a result, some organizations implement SASE by cobbling together multiple standalone tools to achieve the desired objectives.
The Cato SASE Cloud Platform stands out for its focus on true convergence — building the required capabilities into a single-pass engine. By doing so, it reduces complexity and improves performance by eliminating the potential for inefficiencies and duplicated efforts.
FAQs about Cloud Computing Security
Who is responsible for securing cloud data?
While the cloud shared responsibility model has different breakdowns of responsibility between the cloud service provider and customer, the customer is always responsible for securing their own data. This often includes configuring settings and defining access controls.
How does SASE improve cloud security?
SASE integrates networking and security capabilities into a single solution, including support for FWaaS, ZTNA, SWG, and more. SASE offers unified policy enforcement, secure remote access, enterprise-grade threat prevention, and improved security visibility across on-prem and cloud environments.
What is confidential computing?
Confidential computing protects data in use via hardware-based trusted execution environments (TEEs) and confidential VMs. This is important for sensitive workloads and protected data hosted in shared or public cloud environments.
Cloud Computing Security: Next Steps
As cloud environments become more vital to organizations’ IT operations, cloud security grows in importance as well. A corporate cloud security strategy should implement key best practices, such as MFA for authentication, encryption for data security, CSPM for configuration management, and zero trust for access control.
Often, companies deploy standalone tools for cloud security, but this adds complexity and degrades visibility and control. The Cato SASE Cloud Platform simplifies cloud security by converging multiple security and networking capabilities in a single solution, enhancing visibility, scalability, and control.
Explore how Cato Network’s SASE platform delivers end-to-end cloud computing security by requesting a demo.