Intelligent CISO Issue 17 | Page 74

7 BEST PRACTICES FOR SECURING THE PUBLIC CLOUD Organisations across the region are increasingly turning to public cloud services due to the many business benefits they offer. However, it is important that security remains a key consideration, as the responsibility for securing the workloads and data placed in the cloud continues to lie with the customer. Harish Chib, Vice President – Middle East and Africa, Sophos, outlines seven important steps that every organisation can take to secure the public cloud. T he simplicity and cost-effectiveness of the public cloud have led more and more organisations to take advantage of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). You can spin up a new instance in minutes, scale resources up and down whenever you need while only paying for what you use and avoid high upfront hardware costs. While the public cloud solves many traditional IT resourcing challenges, it does introduce new headaches. The rapid growth of cloud usage has resulted in a fractured distribution of data, with workloads spread across disparate instances and, for some 74 organisations, platforms. As a result, keeping track of the data, workloads and architecture changes in those environments to keep everything secure is often a highly challenging task. Public cloud providers are responsible for the security of the cloud (the physical data centres and the separation of customer environments and data). However, the responsibility for securing the workloads and data placed in the cloud lies firmly with the customer. Just as organisations need to secure the data stored in their on-premises networks, so they need to secure their cloud environment. Misunderstandings around this distribution of ownership is widespread and the resulting security gaps have made cloud-based workloads the new pot of gold for today’s savvy hackers. Harish Chib, Vice President – Middle East and Africa, Sophos Securing the public cloud is imperative if you are to protect your infrastructure and organisation from cyberattacks. Seven steps to securing the public cloud The secret to effective cybersecurity in the cloud is improving your overall security posture – ensuring your architecture is secure and configured Issue 17 | www.intelligentciso.com