Five Cloud Security Mistakes Your Business Should Avoid

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The cloud allows your business to host its data effortlessly, without requiring physical hardware, while promising to reduce costs. While this may sound like a dream come true, cloud security comes with possible mistakes that could result in data breaches.

Knowing the security errors to avoid can help your company reduce the risk of data loss or compromise. This article outlines five cloud security mistakes your business should avoid.

1.    Neglecting Your Cloud Security Responsibility
Most businesses assume it's the cloud service provider's responsibility to secure all their data security aspects. Neglecting the shared responsibility between your company and the cloud service provider can be risky. The cloud service provider is responsible for the vast, complex cloud infrastructure, including components like the physical layer, provider services, and virtualization layer.

Your business is responsible for the settings and configurations falling under their direct control. They include data, applications, credentials, configurations, and outside connections. You must fully understand the shared responsibility model agreement to determine where your responsibility starts and where it ends. You may also consider working closely with your service provider to ensure you’re doing all you can to safeguard your data in the cloud.

2.    Overlooking Cloud Encryption
Cloud encryption is a vital step every business should take to safeguard its data and sensitive customer data. It’s a proactive defense mechanism against cyberattacks and data breaches. Overlooking cloud encryption exposes your company and personal data to cyber criminals.

If well implemented, encryption can help your business accomplish data privacy, flexibility, and the compliance required for any company. It also helps your business maintain its integrity. Since data transfer from one device to another increases vulnerability risk, encryption safeguards that data across several devices.

3.    Lack Of Access Control Protocols
Access control involves allowing particular users access to specific business data. It’s also a way to prevent users from accessing restricted data, commonly known as access management. Secure and efficient access management needs personnel authorization and authentication.

Failure to implement sufficient access control management leaves your data vulnerable because anyone can access it. Consider implementing solid access control protocols. There are various access control strategies. However, your business should adopt a suitable approach based on your specific data's sensitivity.

4.    Failure To Delete Your Data
Failure to delete data is a significant cloud security mistake that most businesses commit. It can be a problem, especially for a company that changes its cloud service providers or closes specific accounts. Partial data deletion can also expose your client's private data. Total data deletion is a procedure that your cloud provider should assist with.

However, you also have a responsibility to ensure your data is completely removed from the primary servers, monitoring services, backup servers, and more. Removing data until it's inaccessible and irrecoverable and agreeing with your cloud service provider on deletion strategies can help ensure your data is completely deleted.

5.    Disregarding Zombie Servers
Whether you're on a private or public cloud, zombie servers will burden your resources, environment, and server power, and you might be unable to detect real malicious actors.

Endnote
Cloud security is crucial to your company’s data safety. Familiarize yourself with these cloud security mistakes that your business should avoid.

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