With more and more businesses jumping on the cloud bandwagon, there has been an exponential increase in the number of cyberattacks targeting the cloud.
The main reason behind the increasing incidents of cloud-related cybercrime is the misuse of privileged access. To protect your cloud environment, you need to manage privileged access.
The good news is that most businesses already have a privileged access management system and most of them seem confident about it’s effectiveness.
According to a survey, 40% of respondents say that their privileged access management system is only capable of blocking some types of attacks.
What’s even worse is that 8% of respondents think that their PAM system could prevent unauthorized access. The bad news is that most businesses are already at a higher risk due to over privilege IT administrators.
When you throw hybrid and multi cloud management challenges into the mix, you can make the whole process a lot more complicated.In today’s sophisticated hybrid multi cloud environment, you need a seamless and automated privilege management system in place.
If you really want to secure privileged access in a cloud environment, your PAM systems must support native cloud APIs throughout the cloud deployment cycle.
What’s more, you will also need an identity and access management system.
5 Reasons Why Managing Privileged Access In Cloud Environment
To manage your privilege access in the cloud smartly, you first need to understand the challenges that make the task daunting. That is exactly what we will discuss in this article.
In this article, you will learn about five reasons why managing privilege access in the cloud is not that easy.
1 Lack of Visibility
Did you know that more than half (60%) of CISOs consider lack of visibility into cloud infrastructure as the biggest threat? Despite this, most businesses still use active directory.
Not only that, remaining businesses are either using native endpoint OS tools or using a specific privileged access management tool.
That is why businesses don’t have the type of viability they need for their privileged access accounts. As a result, when their privileged access accounts get compromised, they come to know about the incident when the damage has already been done.
What’s even worse is that some businesses try to do it manually, which not only takes a lot of time and effort but also has some limitations. It restricts you from repeating the same approaches across different instances. Due to this, these processes take more time and resources.
- Invest in a cloud management platform for better visibility into your cloud infrastructure.
- These solutions can provide you alerts whenever a suspicious activity takes place or a threat actor tries to gain unauthorized access to your cloud data.
- This enables you to act quickly and minimize the damage.
- You can also configure these cloud management tools in such a way that it can block security policy breach.
- You can also use encryption and limit what actions user can perform.
2. Business Transformation
More and more businesses are jumping on the digital transformation bandwagon. This requires them to pivot or make a huge shift.
This makes the job of IT professionals even more difficult as they have to adapt quickly according to the changing demands.
To add insult to injury, the number of privileged accounts can grow exponentially as the business grows. Sadly, that is when your business is most vulnerable to cloud based attacks.
If you closely study the number of cloud data breaches in 2020, you will notice this trend.
In fact, almost 80% of all businesses experienced a cloud based data breach last year while 66% became a target of three or more cloud data breaches during the same period.
That is not all, 63% also said that their sensitive business data have been exposed due to these data breaches, as shown by Help Net Security’s survey.
After reading all these statistics, you might be wondering that digital transformation is the only reason behind all these cloud based data breaches.
This might not be the case. There might be other factors that are making organizations more vulnerable to data breaches but business transformation is surely one of them.
3. Migrating To The Cloud
If you are already using manual processes for privileged access management, you will have a hard time migrating it to the hybrid cloud environment such as top VPS in Singapore.
As networks become more dispersed, cyberattacks can use a single privileged access to move laterally through your network. This gives them access to more critical business assets and do as much damage as they can.
They might even steal your data and your security team might not be able to catch them due to poor cloud visibility.
4. Enforcing Privileged Access
If you want to enforce privilege access policies in your organization, you will first have to create a strategy according to the changing cloud dynamics.
This should cover everything from when a new employee becomes a part of your organization and take up their role to when they exit your organization.
Your security team must be able to visualize the changes that occur over time and assign and revoke access based on that. Make sure you delete their account and take away all their permissions that they have when they are working with your organization.
This can minimize the risk of insider threats and credential or privilege abuse. You can also use identity analytics to identify accounts that can land into wrong hands.
5. Merging User and Service Accounts
When you are migrating to the cloud, you not only have to upload all your data but also have to move all your accounts. This includes both user and Affordable seo services UK accounts.
Integrating user and service accounts with your cloud infrastructure is not as easy as on premise servers such as best dedicated server. You need an identity governance and administration system and a holistic approach to efficiently map users to roles.
Final Thoughts
User accounts should be given least privilege while service accounts should be provided with more support. How do you manage privileged access in the cloud? Share it with us in the comments section below.
