Today, customer concerns have evolved beyond whether or not the cloud is secure: instead, they are asking about the recommended best practices to be secure in the cloud. Customers want to know: What kind of controls are available so I know who is accessing my data and when? How do I access and audit my data so I know I’m in compliance? How can I secure a hybrid cloud environment?

Six benefits of cloud security

One of the challenges of moving to the cloud is managing multiple stakeholders in an organisation with varying levels of enthusiasm for a cloud adoption journey.

Understanding the unique benefits of a secure cloud is the first step toward addressing the concerns of security and compliance professionals within your organisation.

A provider who demonstrates these six benefits can help you transform the way you operate, freeing up resources to focus on your core business—all while making your organisation more secure.

• Inherit strong security and compliance controls
• Scale with enhanced visibility and control
• Protect your privacy and data
• Find trusted security partners and solutions
• Use automation to improve security and save time
• Continually improve with innovative security features

Inherit strong security and compliance controls

When you’re choosing a cloud provider, remember that you’ll inherit many of their security controls, strengthening your own compliance and certification programmes. If they’re the right ones, they can dramatically lower the costs of your security assurance efforts. To ensure you select the right provider, look for third-party validation: internationally recognised security best practices and certifications, as well as industry-specific certifications.

Examples of these controls include internationally recognised security best practices and international standard certifications such as ISO 27001, ISO 27017 for cloud security, ISO 27018 for cloud privacy, and system and organisation controls (SOC) 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3. The right provider will also offer services to help you achieve health insurance portability and accountability act HIPAA or payment card industry data security standard (PCI DSS)  compliance and will have achieved many public sector certifications via FedRAMP and the department of defense cloud computing security requirements guide (DoD SRG) in the US, cloud computing compliance criteria catalogue (C5) in Germany, information security registered assessors programme (IRAP) in Australia, and multi-tier cloud security (MTCS)Tier 3 in Singapore.

“Robust security in a  retail environment is critical for us because of our many retail operations. By leveraging the security best practices of Amazon Web Services (AWS), we’ve been able to eliminate a lot of compliance tasks that in the past took up valuable time and money.”, said Brian Mercer, senior software architect of Delaware North, a global food service and hospitality company in New York.

Scale with enhanced visibility and control

The data you store in the cloud isn’t out of sight, out of mind. You need to know where it is and who is accessing it at all times. This information should be available in near real-time wherever you are, regardless of where in the world your data is stored.

Ensure you have the control you need by looking for key features like fine-grain identity and access controls combined with activity-monitoring services that detect configuration changes and security risks across your ecosystem.

Not only will these controls allow you to reduce risk, but you will also be able to scale your organisation more efficiently. Ideally, these cloud-based controls and services will even integrate with your existing solutions to simplify your operations and compliance reporting.

Protect your privacy and data

When you move your data to the cloud, look for a provider who is vigilant about your privacy and offers tools that allow you to easily encrypt your data in transit and at rest to help ensure that only authorised users can access your data.

In addition, when you work with a global cloud infrastructure, you should make sure you can retain complete control over the regions in which your data is physically located. This will be key to your regulators, helping ensure you meet regional and local data privacy laws and regulations as well as data residency requirements.

“Using a vendor with a Sydney region is very important to us from a product performance and a latency perspective. Our customers are in Australia and New Zealand, and data sovereignty was also a concern. We also wanted to use a range of flexible cloud services to optimise the ability of the system to meet customer needs.”, said Trevor Leybourne, head of delivery at Mind Your Own Business, a virtual services company in Ontario.

“Our data is hosted in Europe, which is crucial for us from a security perspective. With AWS, we have complete control over where and how data is stored, and who has access to it. This control, along with the extensive encryption, means we feel safe. We know the Trust’s data is protected”, said Martin Brambley, director of managed service provider (MSP) Sirocco Systems, working with The National Trust United Kingdom.

Find trusted security partners and solutions

One of the biggest advantages of working with a leading cloud provider is gaining access to their partners and the cloud security solutions and consulting services that they offer. There are thousands of security technology and consulting services out there, but knowing which ones are right for your particular use case, where to access them, and how to manage those engagements can be hard.

How can the right cloud security partners help you?

• The right partner will have deep expertise and proven success with your stage in the cloud adoption journey, enabling you to find the right help at the right time. You can also find partners skilled in either hybrid or all-in migrations.

• Use the solutions you already know and trust. Many cloud security partners offer the same tools and services you currently use on-premises, providing a seamless transition to the cloud for your team and your data.

• For highly regulated environments, you can find partners that meet stringent security requirements and have expertise in building, deploying, and managing the types of workloads you wish to migrate to the cloud.

• The right cloud provider will even help you ease billing headaches with “pay as you go” partner pricing and unified billing so you can manage one invoice for all of your cloud spend.

Use automation to improve security and save time

Automating security tasks enables you to be more secure by reducing human configuration errors and giving your team more time to focus on other work that is critical to your business.

You should look for a wide variety of deeply integrated solutions that can be combined to automate tasks in novel ways. This makes it easier for your security team to work closely with developer and operations teams to create and deploy code faster and more securely.

“With AWS, IT is more agile than ever before and able to match the pace of business.”, stated Balakrishna Rao, chief information officer at Manipal Global Education Services

Continually improve with innovative security features

With the right services and tools in the cloud, you can secure your data with greater speed and agility, and your security team can rightly be called an enabler of innovation across the organisation.

Many customers have already migrated with confidence knowing that AWS is architected to be the most flexible and secure cloud computing environment available today. These customers have transformed the way they operate so they can focus on their core business—all while making the organisation more secure.

The first wave of customers found that security in the cloud was as much a cultural shift as a technological upgrade. They have shared some of the key benefits you should keep in mind when seeking the best way to secure data in the cloud.

As confidence in the public cloud grows, we see that the volume of applications being run on shared infrastructure is also growing. This gives us more and varied use cases that reveal the benefits and best practices for operating securely in the cloud.

To achieve this kind of transformation, scale matters. An experienced cloud provider working with millions of customers across the globe should have a team of experienced engineers with deep insights into global trends, giving them remarkable visibility into emerging security challenges. This knowledge, along with customer feedback, should be incorporated back into both their infrastructure and their services. This continual feedback and improvement should enhance core security services like strong identity and access management, detection and monitoring, encryption and key management, network segmentation, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection – and everyone benefits.

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