Enterprises that use the cloud need to secure their infrastructure. Data breaches and other cybercrimes can devastate a company’s reputation and overall business prospects.

A security strategy must include zero trust, micro-segmentation, data encryption, next-generation firewalls with application-aware policies, and threat intelligence. It must also allow security teams to manage these tools from a single interface.

Increased Security

As organizations move to the cloud, they must ensure it is secure. Many traditional security solutions aren’t optimized for the cloud and don’t allow teams to gain visibility of their entire network architecture, making them more vulnerable to attack. In addition, juggling multiple tools makes it hard to keep up with alerts and manage security policies.

A cloud-based security service can be a powerful tool in the fight against cyberattacks. It can help organizations protect their content and applications in the cloud with advanced capabilities such as micro-segmentation to segment infrastructure by workload and data encryption to encode information so that it requires a key to decipher and threat intelligence, monitoring, and prevention.

These advanced features can help prevent unauthorized access that could result in data modification, breach, loss, or exfiltration. It can also help ensure compliance standards are met and reduce the likelihood of a breach that could impact customer privacy or expose trade secrets. Additionally, it can help avoid costly downtime associated with a breach. This is particularly important for mission-critical applications in an organization’s IT landscape.

Scalability

Scalability is the ability to expand a business and its operations without exceeding resources, which is why it’s an essential component of any company. Companies with scalability are more likely to remain profitable and competitive even when the economy dips or customers’ needs shift.

From a technical standpoint, scalability involves systems (hardware or software) that operate at the “right” size for current or expected contexts. This is often referred to as “size awareness.” Cloud network security solutions that are “size-aware” provide scalability for the corporate digital attack surface.

Another aspect of scalability is adjusting or responding to threats as they arise. This is especially critical in hybrid IT environments where on-premise and cloud systems co-exist. A holistic security platform can collect threat data from both on-prem and cloud systems to enable visibility, detection, and response for all attacks.

Cost-Effectiveness

A cybersecurity system that works in the cloud enables business processes and applications to continue running without interruption, even when one location is offline for maintenance. This avoids lost productivity and data loss and ensures that customers and employees can access critical information from any device.

Cloud network security services provide a fully integrated network security stack, including an NGFW, IPS, Anti-Virus, and SSL/TLS traffic inspection. This reduces hardware and software licensing costs and the need to hire cybersecurity professionals. In addition, these solutions are commonly offered as a service with fully managed infrastructure, which transforms capital expenses into operating costs.

Traditional security frameworks often require multiple tools with limited visibility into application dependencies and content. The lack of integration leads to a single point of failure and creates redundancies and inconsistencies, making them difficult to sustain across multi-cloud environments. Cloud network security services offer centralized definition and management of policies, providing visibility into complex cloud architectures and ensuring consistent threat prevention. They also support multi-availability-zone and multi-region architectures, avoiding legacy systems’ single point of failure.

Flexibility

Cloud security systems route traffic using software-defined networking as an alternative to on-premise infrastructure. This approach uses a zero-trust security model that requires authentication and verification for each connection. This provides more robust protection for critical assets and defends them throughout the threat lifecycle.

Cloud network security solutions also provide centralized monitoring and management, often from a single pane of glass. These solutions can integrate with existing on-prem security systems to help reduce complexity and eliminate silos between disparate infrastructures.

Cloud surfaces the adequate Internet exposure of cloud resources to give security teams easy-to-understand visibility into their risk. The solution automatically builds a complete network path to and from these resources and provides visibility into what is out there. This allows you to identify open pathways that could be used for lateral movement and reduce your attack surface radius.

Centralized management of security policies for cloud services, databases, and websites reduces the time required to detect misconfigurations and potentially risky settings. In addition, comprehensive logging enables organizations to monitor and protect data from any source in the cloud, including serverless functions.

Compliance

Security and compliance are a large part of cloud network services. This includes providing solutions like vulnerability and penetration testing, which helps to identify issues that malicious actors could exploit. It also means ensuring that your cloud deployments comply with regulations and standards.

Another critical area for cloud network security is enforcing safe user behavior. This can be achieved through policies, training, and education for employees. It can also be done through technology that identifies unsafe behaviors and blocks unauthorized software or services.

A good cloud service provider will have robust and transparent employee screening processes that help to prevent security breaches by identifying potential issues like privileged users, insider threats, and compromised accounts. They will also be able to provide a solution that provides complete visibility of your data and who is accessing it on all devices and geolocations. This can help ensure regulatory compliance with governmental standards. This may include implementing a DLP (data loss protection) policy.