By Monica Brink,Director, EMEA Marketing at iland

In recent years, there has been a large-scale shift in perception with most IT teams now considering cloud security to be superior to on-premise environments. Despite this, companies often expose themselves to unnecessary risk by blindly relying on a glut of technology they are unable to actively manage. With the summer holidays having just begun, mobiles, laptops and tablets will no doubt be making their way across the channel, along with their owners, so that networks can be logged onto and emails checked at leisure. With employees’ intentions in the right place, it is up to organisations to stay one step ahead to ensure that security is not being compromised.

The majority of individuals are unlikely to take personal responsibility for their device’s security, instead relying upon their company security team or app developers. Even those who are usually cautious may let their guard down whilst on holiday. With an overwhelming array of new technology and apps producing ever increasing amounts of often sensitive data, there is enormous scope for hackers to breach this personal and company data. What’s more, with employees logging in to company networks via their own devices when on holiday, this opens up a lot of sensitive data that will be available via millions of unsecure devices. Therefore, keeping internet-connected devices safe and secure whilst abroad is vital.

Even if you secure devices on a network, you still need to secure your systems and infrastructure right from the server to the end user. This includes wherever that infrastructure might be – most of which is likely to be in the cloud; companies need to ensure that the end-to-end attack surfaces are all fully protected. This is clearly evident from the many infrastructure breaches we have seen recently in the press.

With more businesses adopting cloud than ever before, the cloud infrastructure that employees are working from must also be just as secure to cope with a security breach and protect all of that data. Making sure your cloud networks, infrastructure, applications and data are as secure as possible is a vital part of ensuring your data is not being compromised by your employees when working remotely. Ultimately, organisations need to ensure they have the right level of security technologies embedded into their cloud platform in order to gain control of all web-based traffic in and actively manage which communications should be permitted and which should be blocked.

Here are three security issues that organisations must consider and address to ensure a fully-secure cloud:

1. Threat landscape monitoring against attacks – making sure that you know where the most vulnerable points are in your existing infrastructure means you can work to address and protect them. Having vulnerability scanning capabilities embedded into your cloud infrastructure that can monitor the threat landscape, scan for vulnerabilities and detect any potential threats can keep your organisation safe from debilitating infrastructure breaches.
2. Compliance – many companies have specific compliance policies they must adhere to such as ISO 27001, as well as industry specific regulatory compliance requirements. Having a fully-compliant cloud infrastructure that fits to your country’s regulations and adheres to data sovereignty rules, such as that in the iland Secure Cloud, is essential in these highly regulated environments. More importantly, though, is the need to have the visibility into your cloud infrastructure that enables you to monitor cloud security and prove (to the C-Suite or auditors) that your company apps and data are secure and compliant. Cloud transparency and security and compliance reporting will become essential as cloud adoption grows and is used for more mission-critical business workloads.
3. Encryption of data – the ability to encrypt sensitive data is beneficial for remote access for a number of reasons; including making sure that service providers cannot access this information, deterring hackers and adding an additional layer of security for extra-sensitive data. Being able to hold your own key to this data encryption provides the power and security that comes with placing the highest possible restrictions on who can access sensitive data.

The emergence of remote working means that the need to safeguard the confidential data on employees’ smartphones and tablets has never been more pressing. As we head into the busy holiday period, it is vital to have conversations with your cloud provider to ensure that you are on the same page where security is concerned. Otherwise, your infrastructure may not be fully protected and this can result in your company data being left exposed to unacceptable risk. Enjoy your summer holiday!