How do you secure your architecture in the cloud?

The digital economy is now data-driven, and cloud services are essential to this. The EU wants more than 75% of businesses to use solutions like big data, machine learning, and deep learning by 2030 as part of their digital transformation. To make this possible, companies must adopt a safe design for their cloud systems.

Ensuring the security of cloud application architecture data is one of the biggest challenges of cloud migration. And it’s a smart approach – cybersecurity shouldn’t be left on the sidelines. After all, even cloud companies regularly review their security configurations. 

Fortunately, the cloud is generally safe. Big cloud companies like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure put a lot of effort into making sure that the cloud is safe and follows different levels of permission. The problem usually does not come from the technology itself, but from the parts and solutions that are included with it.

If you’re wondering how to strengthen data security in the cloud, this article is for you. We’ll analyze the most common cloud security vulnerabilities and discuss the most common methods for protecting your organization’s critical systems and data

Moving to cloud-native: things to think about

Here are some key points about cloud application architecture patterns to keep in mind when moving to the cloud. In order to meet the company’s resilience requirements for the cloud architecture, the following key factors must be considered when designing workloads:

1. Project complexity – as a general rule, the more complex the workload becomes, the more complex the resiliency requirements will be. Every single component of the workload must be fault-tolerant, and you must eliminate single points of failure in people, processes, and process components.
2. Cost of deployment – Costs often increase significantly after implementing additional resiliency as new software and infrastructure components are required.
3. Operational effort – Implementing and maintaining highly resilient systems requires more complex operational processes and advanced technical skills. Before making a decision to increase resiliency, assess your operational competence to confirm that you have the required level of process and skill maturity.
4. Cloud security efforts – Security system complexity is less directly related to resiliency. However, highly resilient systems tend to have more elements to protect. 

What is the cloud security architecture?

You can reach out for the cloud application architecture guide pdf and find out that it includes various controls, procedures, and technologies to protect an organization’s critical systems and data from cyber and misconfiguration threats.

Developing a cloud security architecture strategy should begin during the planning and design process and should be integrated with cloud platforms from the outset. Unfortunately, all too often, cloud architects focus on performance before improving security.

Why is cloud security architecture important?

Cloud services help companies by giving them the ability to be flexible in how they work, be more efficient in their operations, and save money. These are characteristics of how companies change to keep up with the market by being able to quickly provide services and make decisions based on data.

Cloud architecture needs to be constructed so that companies can behave responsibly without endangering their data. If there is no security for the cloud, it can be more dangerous to use it than useful.

Cloud security challenges

Securing data in the cloud is an organization’s first priority. This is significant because cloud environments have a huge number of relocatable modules, including compute instances, storage modules, databases, containers, and serverless functions. We at ModLogix want to clarify that most of these are short-lived, with new instances being started and shut down every day. Moreover, if any of these resources are misconfigured, they will allow attackers to access them through public networks, exfiltrate data, and damage critical systems. That’s why proper cloud configuration is so significant.

Now let’s take a look at some major issues to consider when designing a cloud security architecture:

DDoS attacks

Direct Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks typically attack a system with requests until it is shut down. You can fend off these attacks by using network compliance policies to filter out repeated requests. Cloud providers can shift workloads and traffic to other resources while they work to restore the system. However, persistent DoS attacks are very destructive and often cause firmware-level corruption, preventing the server from starting up. In this case, the network administrator must reboot the firmware and rebuild the system from scratch, which can shut down servers for days or weeks.

Incorrect access configuration

While cloud providers offer robust identity and access management capabilities, every business must ensure proper configuration. Cloud systems are not automatically safe, and sometimes it is too simple for employees to make cloud resources and forget about them. Misconfiguration of cloud services happens when we give hackers an easy way to get to our data. This can happen if we leave open ports or give too many permissions.

Insecure APIs

Everything stored or accessed online has a tool called an API which is very useful but also has the potential to cause harm. If APIs are not safe or have weak authentication, they can let attackers get into and take over everything. APIs are like the entrance to the cloud, and they are usually easily accessible.

Compliance risk

Always make sure that the company providing your cloud services follows all necessary rules for how systems should work and knows what tools you can use to meet your obligations to follow the rules.

No control

Cloud service providers are in charge of keeping their systems secure, but they don’t give details about how data moves or the inside structure. So, it’s up to the company to make sure security measures are taken. Unfortunately, studies show (Acronis Survey 2021) that, for example, 85% of companies do not back up daily, although more than 38.7% have lost data once and 42% have lost data irretrievably.

This is why it is so important to develop an effective cloud security architecture strategy and thus avoid unwanted threats.