In a cloud security breach, the problem is misconfigurations in identity and access management (IAM policy). In a tight regulatory environment, a robust IAM policy can secure your cloud environment from inadvertent data leaks.
A Gartner piece from 2019 titled ‘Is the cloud secure’ makes an excellent observation –in a cloud security breach, the problem rarely lies with the cloud itself. Rather, it exists in identity and access management or IAM policies and technologies. Most often, the fault is not with the cloud provider, but the user, who fails to manage the controls used to protect an organization’s data.
Here’s how this could happen: Let’s say you have finally migrated to the public cloud, and a well-recognized one at that. The team is putting in place controls to secure your data, network, and applications. However, while granting storage access, you choose ‘authenticated users only’ as the setting. What you don’t realize is that ‘authenticated users’ refers to any user authenticated by the public cloud. This inadvertent error in setting up the IAM policy has exposed your data to the wider public and set in motion a chain of events that could cost you dearly.
Someone realizes the misconfiguration. Unfortunately, they don’t belong to your organization and decide to resort to the exfiltration of your highly sensitive data. This is only one example of a cloud misconfiguration in an ocean.
A Simple Misconfiguration Could Prove to be Costly
A misconfiguration could be an inadvertent error, a security gap, or technical glitches that compromise your data on the cloud and expose you to risk.
Common cloud misconfigurations include unrestricted inbound and outbound ports, poor management of passwords, admin credentials and encryption keys, unsecured automated data backup, storage access issues, not employing a validation mechanism to automatically alert as soon as there is a misconfiguration, hijacking of unused subdomains. The list runs long.
Gartner also predicts that by 2025, 90% of organizations that fail to control public cloud use will inappropriately share sensitive data. However, 99% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.
In this scenario, identity and access management (IAM) takes on a whole new meaning.
Attend a Webinar on IAM Policy Best Practices to know more: Register here.
Is your data at risk?
The public cloud is like a virtual co-working space. Several organizations sit shoulder-to-shoulder and host their data using the cloud infrastructure as a service. Therefore, it is critical to understand how to navigate the public cloud right so as to take advantage of the infrastructure rather than exposing your data to threats.
Ransomware, malware injections, insider threats, cloud leaks, and external hacks – your data is vulnerable to some or all of these risks through misconfigurations in your cloud environment.
With cloud comes scalability but also not enough visibility. Going easy on access restrictions can expose sensitive data to insider threats. Similarly, unencrypted backup data could also be taken advantage of.
In an increasingly tight regulatory environment, enterprises cannot afford data breaches. A robust IAM policy can secure your cloud environment from inadvertent data leaks.
Join Entersoft’s CTO Rony Alex Onel and Charan Mukkamala, a Principal Security Engineer at Entersoft in a webinar on IAM Policy Best Practices, as they illustrate with real-time hacks to show what happens when IAM policies are configured to defaults.
This webinar is highly recommended for administrative teams who are required to secure their organizations’ cloud environment.
Register here to attend. It’s never too late to strengthen your risk and security posture.