The 15 best cloud security practices

CloudSecurity
BestPractices
PRESENTED BY CLOUDRIDE
© 2020 | CLOUDRIDE.CO.IL | HELLO@CLOUDRIDE.CO.IL

TABLEOFCONTENTS
UNDERSTAND YOUR SECURITY POSTURE/ STATUS
Employee education on cloud security
Your current security process
Documentation for the incident response
process
Your most critical data
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CLOUD SECURITY BEST PRACTICES.
Enable single sign-on (SSO)
Turn on conditional access
Proactively monitor your cloud
infrastructure for threats
Adopt multi-factor authentication (MFA)
Gain visibility into your cloud
environment.
Educate your employees
Audit and Optimize
Monitor File Integrity
Disable SSH/RDP Access to virtual
machines.
Implement data encryption
Utilize intrusion detection and prevention
technologies
Conduct Audits and run penetration
testing
Secure the endpoints
Develop a safe list
Start with low-risk assets
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15 Cloud Security
Best Practices to
secure your cloud
infrastructure.
Whether you’ve migrated to the cloud or are thinking of
migrating your infrastructure, security is and should
always be your top priority.
Most organizations think security solely lies with the
cloud vendors but more often than not, it isn’t the case.
It’s your responsibility to exert all necessary measures to
protect your data, applications, systems and networks.
Alongside all the benefits cloud computing has to offer,
it also presents new security challenges; from increased
complexity straining the IT staff to challenging security
control on multi-cloud environments.
This eBook will delve into how you can understand your
security posture, best practices for cloud security, who is
responsible for cloud security and how Cloudride can
help in securing your data and protecting your systems
and networks from security threats.

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Employee education on cloud security
Your current security process
Documentation for the incident response process
Your most critical data
Your security posture should tie directly to your company’s objectives,
business, scaling needs and expansion, so that you can know the true
evaluation of your security status.
Below are points you should consider to determine and understand your
security posture.
Is the company staff aware and conversant with the basic security
measures in place, the reasons why, the do’s & don’ts and the importance
of maintaining such security best practices?Your staff is more likely to
alert the IT team when something seems off more so when they
understand the security basics and security measures implemented. The
IT team should seek to educate all staff on cloud security and build a
security culture in the company.
Does your current security process prove to be effective in securing your
cloud infrastructure?Conduct an audit to measure the effectiveness of
the security process and the various security controls. Assess and
reassess security threats and implications, and test your security controls’
resilience to such potential risks.
Do you have a well-documented incident response process? In any
organization running on the cloud, at some point, an incident will occur.
If it does, there should be a process put in place for detection, response,
mitigation, elimination and education.
The IT and security team should have in place a clear data vulnerability
hierarchy, specifying which data is of top importance (security-wise) to
the business. Data such as client information and intellectual property
are usually a top priority in protecting the business against security
threats.
After understanding your security posture, you can then implement cloud
security best practices.
UNDERSTAND YOUR SECURITY
POSTURE/STATUS.
© 2020 | CLOUDRIDE.CO.IL | HELLO@CLOUDRIDE.CO.IL 4

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To ensure your cloud environment and workload is secure, make sure the
following measures are in place:
1. Enable single sign-on (SSO)
One of the main causes of breaches is compromised credentials. The
more passwords we have - the less complex they tend to be. This is
natural because with multiple passwords, it becomes more and more
difficult to remember so we tend to start using weak passwords and
reusing passwords across different applications. This makes your cloud
workloads susceptible to security threats.
Once you establish the SSO, your users can access the resources and data
they need without having to remember a ton of passwords for each
application or service they need to use.
In addition, SSO enables you to control and manage employee access to
specific resources or data, based on the employee’s role, ‘need-to-know’
and other criteria you have in place.
For organizations using Microsoft Azure, they can enable SSO through
Azure AD and businesses on AWS can enable it through the AWS SSO
Console.
Organizations not enabling SSO, run the risk of a breach because of users
using common passwords on all applications and use of weak passwords
which can easily be compromised.
2. Turn on conditional access
Employees not only bring their personal devices to work but also use the
devices to access the organization’s resources. The same devices would,
later on, be installed with personal apps.
The problem arises when the non-monitored devices don’t meet your
security standards and the organization’s data is compromised.
CLOUD SECURITY BEST PRACTICES.

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Run Azure AD anomaly reports on a daily basis or on-demand to identify
brute force attacks on an account, attempts of signing in from multiple
locations, sign-ins from infected devices and suspicious IP addresses.
Use Azure AD Identity Protection to protect your organization’s identities.
Configure risk-based policies that respond to detected issues when a
specific risk level is reached.
Leverage Azure Monitor. It provides an analysis of how your applications
are performing and proactively identifies issues that might affect the
applications and services you use.
Identity Access control measures (i.e monitoring who is accessing
resources) aren’t enough. It is imperative for you to know how the
resources are accessed in order to secure your workloads.
Through the Azure Active Directory and AWS Identity and Access
Management, you can make automated control decisions based on
conditions for accessing your cloud resources.
3. Proactively monitor your cloud infrastructure for threats
Security solutions used to be reactive in nature, but with the rise of more
complex attacks and with the increase in sensitive data & resources
stored on the cloud, IT managers, DevOps engineers, Site Reliability
engineers and developers need to be proactive in the sense that enables
better implementation of security best practices to avoid risk, and also
detecting anomalies early on, before they spread to compromise your
entire cloud infrastructure.
Most hackers sit on your system for days or even months gathering
intelligence to attack your system and steal your data undetected. This
brings about the need to actively monitor your system and infrastructure
to identify suspicious activities and malware in the system before they
take hold.
For businesses on Microsoft Azure, you can implement the following
monitoring measures:

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Use Amazon CloudWatch to detect suspicious activity in your
environment, visualize logs, implement automated measures,
troubleshoot issues and analyze insights of your applications, AWS
resources and services.
Leverage Amazon GuardDuty to identify malicious activity in your AWS
account. With information gleaned from your VPC Flow Logs, AWS
CloudTrail Event Logs, and DNS logs, this allows GuardDuty to detect
many different types of dangerous and mischievous behavior including
probes for known vulnerabilities, port scans and probes, and access from
unusual locations.
For those running their infrastructure on AWS, impose the following
monitoring measures:
Organizations that don’t monitor their infrastructure frequently, run the
risk of compromising the security on their systems. Security attacks differ
from one to another, and there is no single cut & paste measure that if
worked once, will therefore work indefinitely. Without frequently
scanning, monitoring and managing these threats, organizations can’t be
in control and mitigate risk.
4. Adopt multi-factor authentication (MFA)
The conventional authentication techniques of solely using a username
and a password are insufficient in cloud environments, because the cloud
is susceptible to attacks.
The solution is, therefore, the implementation of MFA. The goal of MFA is
to provide an extra layer of security to make it challenging for an
unauthorized entity to access the network, applications, services or the
entire infrastructure.
MFA requires users to receive a security code on their phone or a one-
time password to use as opposed to just a username and password. This
will make it harder for hackers or unauthorized entities to gain access to
your cloud, as they won’t obtain the code or the one-time password even
when they have access to your standard credentials.

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Have strong access control management in place. This would ensure no
user is given more privileges than necessary and end up misusing their
access by breaching data from the inside. Constantly monitor user
activity to ensure no deviation from the company policies.
Protect your data at rest and in motion and implement data loss
prevention (DLP) to ensure, if data is compromised, it won’t get out of
the network.
Even the strongest of security measures sometimes can’t prevent all
breaches, so at some point, a breach might occur. When it does, you
must be prepared by putting in place processes and technologies to
mitigate the risks and reduce the attack implications.
5. Gain visibility into your cloud environment.
To secure their cloud environment, organizations need to map their
entire infrastructure and know every application, service, data running on
it, the ones running but not used, and all the authorized users for each.
Organizations often obtain various cloud technologies, features or
applications they don’t necessarily need… some without collaboration
with the IT and security team. This will cause visibility & control issues in
your cloud environment, because it makes it difficult to track all the
assets running on your infrastructure.
In addition to that, as most organizations use containerized workloads,
many security and IT teams find it difficult to make sense of how
container technology works. So really your organization would be going
in blind when the IT team is left behind. The main point is that you can’t
secure what you can’t see.
So how do you get visibility and control over your infrastructure security?
Here are a few best practices you can implement.
Maintaining strong visibility into your cloud is essential because you are
then able to protect your applications, critical data, workloads and
network from critical breaches.

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6. Educate your employees
Successful cloud migration and smooth running of the workloads
without security issues depends, to some extent, on the capabilities of
the employees and how conversant they are with cloud infrastructure
environments.
The security processes, protocols and measures you set in place to
protect your cloud are useful only when your employees understand and
know how to implement and abide by them.
For instance, when implementing the single sign-on, you should educate
them on why it is important and how to use it.
In addition to that, they should also be able to identify the different types
of cyberattacks and various mitigation strategies, so they can be on the
lookout if they sense something is off.
Having an educated staff would ease the burden put on the security and
IT team trying to maintain strong visibility into the cloud environment
because the staff would be only using approved applications and
services, communicate detected anomalies and abide by protocols.
7. Audit and Optimize
An important cybersecurity best practice is to constantly audit and
optimize your posture and infrastructure.
The frequency of the audits depends on the complexity of your cloud
environment. It can be daily, weekly or monthly but be sure to audit your
cloud security frequently enough and consistently.
An audit would shed light on the unapproved applications and services
that crop up and pose a risk to your cloud posture and environment. It
also shows where your environment is more vulnerable and susceptible
to threats.

Leveraging the point-to-site VPN also referred to as the remote access
VPN server connection. A user can use SSH or RDP to connect to any
virtual machine that the user accessed via the point to site VPN.
8. Monitor File Integrity
As you are well aware, there is a great number of sophisticated threats
targeting organizations, and it’s only a matter of time until a breach of
some sort occurs.
Cloud threats attack key assets of an organization in an attempt to
progress undetected towards the system control and critical data.
File integrity monitoring provides a layer of defense to identify suspicious
changes in system files and prevents attacks from occurring before they
cause critical damage.
File Integrity monitoring tools analyze current file attributes and
compare these to the baseline, aiming to identify any suspicious
changes.
9. Disable SSH/RDP Access to virtual machines.
Virtual machines are accessed by using Remote Desktop Protocol and
the Secure Shell Protocol. These protocols enable the management of
Virtual machines from remote locations and are standard in cloud
computing.
The main security concern of using these protocols over the internet is
that attackers can attack your virtual machines using bruteforce
techniques. They’ll then use the compromised virtual machine as a
launch point to infiltrate other virtual machines on your virtual network.
Disabling access from RDP and SSH to these virtual machines over the
internet will secure your virtual network from such attacks.
Below are some alternative ways you can access your virtual machines
for remote management.

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Use a site to site VPN. it connects an entire network to another network
through the internet. You can connect your on-premise network to your
virtual network, then users can access your virtual machine through RDP
and SSH protocols over the site to site VPN without the need of allowing
direct access of RDP and SSH over the internet.
Using alternatives to accessing virtual machines over the internet other
than using RDP and SSH would provide an extra layer of security to your
cloud infrastructure.
10. Implement data encryption
Date encryption is basically encoding your data so that it remains
inaccessible from unauthorized users. This means that even if due to a
security breach your data is accessed, it is useless to the attackers as they
won’t be able to read it.
Best practice is to encrypt your data both at rest, and in transit, because
most attacks happen on data that is being shared and on the move. Both
Azure and AWS offer SQL database transparent data encryption which
performs real-time encryption and decryption of the database, backups
and log files. It encrypts the entire database using a symmetric key.
Local encryption added to the encryption services offered by your cloud
provider would add an extra layer of security.
11. Utilize intrusion detection and prevention technologies
This is a reactive form of cloud security best practice. These IDS and IPS
identify an attack once it occurs, and take measures to stop the attack.
They also alert administrators of suspicious activities and policy
violations.
You can use the intrusion systems offered by your cloud provider in
conjunction with a comprehensive third-party IDS and IPS solution.

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12. Conduct Audits and run penetration testing
Penetration testing determines whether your current cloud security
efforts are effective in protecting your data and workloads.This is
important because it shows you where your system is most vulnerable,
and you can then improve your security measures.
In parallel, conduct regular audits of your cloud security capabilities. This
includes an audit of your cloud provider’s capabilities in securing your
infrastructure and that they are meeting the security standards required.
13. Secure the endpoints
To be more productive, organizations have granted access to data and
applications from anywhere, anytime and from any device.
The endpoint devices accessing your data complicate cloud security in
many ways.
From the growing list of endpoint devices accessing the cloud which is
susceptible to attacks and exposes the whole network, to the lack of
knowledge of the content of those endpoint devices.
If you’ve already put up measures such as intrusion detection and
prevention solutions, using conditional access, antimalware and other
measures, then you have the right solutions in place
But you still have to constantly be on the lookout for new threats that
might override your current security measures and optimize accordingly.
14. Develop a safe list
Employees conduct their work using various cloud services but there are
cases where they use the services for their personal gains. This might
bring about compromise in security and legal problems due to
compliance issues.

Define your cloud security needs and requirements before choosing a
cloud vendor. If you know your requirements, you’ll select a cloud
provider suited to answer your needs.
As such, developing a safe list as part of your security measures is vital.
This safe list would stipulate the services employees are allowed to
access through their cloud accounts and they are aware of the type of
data which is allowed to be shared over the cloud.
15. Start with low-risk assets
As you migrate to the cloud, start with less sensitive data and
applications. Move items that would not cost much due to downtime and
data loss.
You would be vetting the reliability and capabilities of your cloud
provider in securing your assets. When you have vetted them and are
confident in their capabilities, you can move the high-risk assets such as
clients’ data.
Who is responsible for cloud security?
Within the field of cloud environments, there are generally two parties
responsible for infrastructure security.
1. Your cloud vendor.
2. Your own company’s IT / Security team.
Some companies believe that as cloud customers, when they migrate to
the cloud, cloud security responsibilities fall solely on the cloud vendors.
Well, it is clearly described in detail above, that’s not the case.
Both the cloud customers and cloud vendors share responsibilities in
cloud security and are both liable to the security of the environment and
infrastructure.
To better manage the shared responsibility, consider the following tips:

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Clarify the roles and responsibilities of each party when it comes to cloud
security. Comprehensively define who is responsible for what and to what
extent. Know how far your cloud provider is willing to go to protect your
environment.
Basically, CSPs are responsible for the security of the physical or virtual
infrastructure and the security configuration of their managed services
while the cloud customers are in control of their data and the security
measures they set in place to protect their data, system, networks and
applications.
Cloudride is a full-service consultancy firm for public cloud platforms,
with expertise in main cloud providers such as MS-AZURE, AWS and GCP
alongside with an ISVs wide ecosystem in order to provide coherent
solutions tailored to each customer's needs.
Driven by market best practices approach and uncompromised security
awareness, Cloudride's expert team is obligated to serve customer needs
in a timely manner, pursuing the highest quality of delivery and keeping
budget constraints under control.
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The 15 best cloud security practices

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