How To Secure Your Cloud Solution

Ever since the concept of doing business “in the cloud” emerged, cloud security has been a top of mind concern for IT, C-level leaders, and anyone managing private data digitally.

Not having full control over the backend infrastructure or fully understanding how it’s kept secure can be a frightening prospect that keeps many business leaders up at night.

But thanks to the legitimate concern for security measures, cloud providers have risen to the challenge and devised numerous ways to keep worried minds at ease.

In addition to the various security measures managed by cloud providers, including data encryption, firewalls, 24/7 network monitoring, and more, there are several things businesses can do to prevent data breaches.

In today’s blog post we’ll run through the different things you can do to prevent data breaches for your business.

Cloud Security Is In Your Hands

Regardless of who your cloud provider is, maintaining security is ultimately up to you and your provider together.

Some of the most critical safety precautions must take place on a daily basis by every employee who leverages your cloud infrastructure.

Here is a comprehensive list of best practices for maintaining a secure cloud environment:

Manage Access

The best defense begins with an awareness of who has access to your solution.

Dedicate some time to determine login and password standards, role-based access controls, and training on how to access your data safely.

Employees should understand how they can help keep data secure by maintaining private passwords, leveraging secured networks, and staying aware of potential threats.

This will help your organization prevent data breaches from the start.

Monitor Email

One of the greatest threats to any business is nefarious email scams. As busy as employees’ inboxes get, it can be that much harder to stay on top of dangerous emails.

It’s also important to remember that scammers are becoming more sophisticated and finding ways to make their emails ridden with viruses to look like official communications from managers and colleagues.

In addition to anti-virus and anti-spam protection, employees should also be trained on how to identify suspicious senders, scare tactics, and how to handle emails they believe to be unsafe.

An example of this is a cyber attacker posing as upper management through a fake email address. These are called phishing attacks, and companies fall victim to them daily. Watch the below video from Mindcore’s CEO, where he explains phishing attacks in more detail:

Leverage SD-WAN Infrastructure

Software-defined Wide Area Network, or SD-WAN, technology optimizes your network with customized traffic routing, network visibility, and user-level controls.

SD-WAN can also provide an added level of security because of its encrypted pathways for managing your traffic. And by managing all of your activity with centralized management, it makes it difficult for hackers to access your network.

Click here to read about the Top 7 Things You Didn’t Know About SD-WAN

Stay Up To Date On Compliance Standards

In addition to internal security, securing your cloud environment is also important for your customers.

Depending on your line of business, keep track of critical compliance standards such as HIPAA, GDPR, PCI, and others.

It’s also recommended to have annual security audits to make sure that your cloud solution is still built to withstand breaches.

Doing this will also have added benefits for you by allowing you to provide peace of mind for your customers and increase their trust in you.

Upgrade To Unified Communications

If you are leveraging different applications and technologies for your operational needs, this can lead to potential problems (even if they’re all in the cloud). Not only is your data more likely to be inconsistent across different platforms, but managing the security for each one is more cumbersome.

Unified Communications, or UCaaS, solutions avoid these pitfalls by offering everything you need on a single platform.

By having your VoIP, video and audio conferencing, mobile, chat, fax, CRM applications accessible from one central platform, you automatically reduce the likelihood of “shadow IT” compromising your security through simple human error.

Plus, a UCaaS solution is much easier to secure since you only need to focus on a single platform instead of several.

Choose A Solution That Does It All

While this list is comprehensive, it is by no means a complete guide to securing your cloud environment.

There are an infinite number of possibilities to keep in mind when it comes to ensuring your private data is protected.

To make things easy on yourself, you should look into cloud solutions that offer or facilitate everything on this list and more.

These end-to-end or Full Spectrum Communications providers will be able to provide both the security and the best-of-breed cloud platform your business needs to thrive.

Click here to learn about Mindcore’s Full Spectrum Cloud Solution

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