For most companies looking forward to digitizing their assets, cloud computing has become a go-to option. Unfortunately, the increasing number of cloud-based businesses has built new opportunities for cybercriminals looking for chances and ways of accessing corporate networks.
Cyber-attacks have become more devastating and frequent, thus increasing the need for cloud security and data privacy more than ever. Although cloud computing allows for efficient mobility and flexibility, it comes with a particular risk to businesses applying it. Each business, despite its size, requires a cloud security solution to secure its data and network.
What Are Cloud Security Solutions?
Cloud security solutions refer to policies, technologies, controls, and services that protect applications, cloud data, and infrastructure from any attacks.
Cloud computing involves delivering hosted services such as hardware, software, and storage over the internet. Cloud computing has become virtually universal in companies of all sizes due to low upfront costs, rapid deployment, scalability, and flexibility.
The cloud security solutions secure the connection between the user and cloud-based software, lowering the cybersecurity risk. Also, cloud-based security solutions assist in monitoring and tracking network activity to block unsafe content online and prevent attacks.
The cloud security solutions also enhance website speed performance and security due to various features such as real-time firewall updates and network scanning.
Why Do You Need Cloud-Based Security Solutions?
Most organizations today are embracing cloud-based security solutions. From orchestration tools to security monitoring platforms to alerting systems; this is essential in managing tactical and strategic security initiatives.
Cloud-based security solutions provide purpose-built technological solutions which will assist you in staying on top of security without having to add more security personnel to your company. Cloud solutions are most appropriate if a company has limited in-house resources and expertise.
How to Choose a Cloud Security Solutions?
However, before selecting a cloud-based security solution, you need to take several considerations into account. First, the factors that focus on the provider of the solution and the solution itself.
Have a constructive conversation with the provider; it will assist in determining which products and providers best fit the needs of your company. It is crucial to be well-inform and approach your entire security program holistically and strategically within your environment to the security tools you select.
Here are the top factors to keep in mind when selecting a cloud security solution.
- Manageability
Spend some time and find out what different cloud platforms will demand from you to manage. All cloud security solution services support various orchestration tools and integrate with varying services. Where you have services that are quite vital to your company, consider selecting a cloud provider who is offering a relatively easy way of integrating with them.
Otherwise, ensure your company is comfortable integrating with a similar service that is supported. Also, before making any final decision, you need to determine how much effort and time it will require your team to manage different aspects of the cloud infrastructure.
- Cloud Security
Put into consideration what your security goals are and the security measures that are provided by every cloud provider. Understand the mechanisms the provider uses to preserve your data and application. Also, ensure you thoroughly understand particular areas that every party is responsible for.
You will have to evaluate what security features are given free put -the-the box for every vendor you are considering. Check the additional paid services available from the providers and where you might need to replace them with a third-party partner’s technology.
For instance, Google Cloud and AWS make the process relatively easy since they list their paid products, security features, and partner’s integration on the security section of their websites.
- Support
Another parameter that you need to pay attention to supports. In some instances where you need help will you acquire it quickly and simply? Some providers offer support through a call center or chat service; which might not be appropriate for you.
Other cloud providers will grant access to the dedicated resource but with the likelihood of time and access constraints. Always ask the question upfront on the form and level of support accessibility before settling for a cloud provider.
- Experience In Your Industry
Every industry has varying customer requirements, threats, and compliance regulations. If your industry is highly regulated, you will have to meet compliance mandates such as PCI-DSS and HIPAA. However, you can go above and beyond the requirements to enhance the complete security of your data.
Confirm that the cloud security provider you are considering is appropriate for your industry. The provider should have previously worked with clients within your space to successfully meet security and compliance needs. You can ask for a reference or check the website for a list of clients who they work with or listen to testimonials.
- Cloud Compliance
Ensure you select a cloud architecture platform that can assist you to meet compliance standards that are required in your organization or industry. Despite the type of framework, you are beholden to like HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2 or PCI DSS ensure you familiarize yourself with what it will take to meet compliance, once your data and applications are stored in public cloud infrastructure.
Understand your responsibilities and the aspects of compliance where the cloud provider will assist you to check off.
- Costs
Even though the cost isn’t the most crucial factor, it plays a huge role in determining which cloud service provider you select. Carefully check both sticker price and associated costs like personnel you might be required to hire to manage the instances.
Keep reading to learn the best cloud-based security solutions for your business.
1. CloudPassage Halo
It focuses on a unified security platform for all of your cloud assets, including cloud servers, Public IaaS (Infrastructure as a service), and containers. CloudPassage Halo’s solution operates on the principle that proactive security is a much better approach than vendor-level endpoint security. The philosophy of security first assists in preventing zero-day attacks, even where the vendor isn’t able to issue a hotfix early enough.
This security product comes in three different services, which includes:
o Server secure; which involves Cloud workload protection platform (Windows and Linux)
o Cloud secure; it contains cloud security posture management Google cloud, AWS, and Azure)
o Container secure; that involves Kubernetes, Security for Docker, and CD
CloudPassage operates on the IaaS level for public and private infrastructures while covering hybrid environments. At the same time, it ensures the level of a server is compliant with industry standards by working on the bare metal level. Moreover, it enhances most containerization, thus offering users three layers of cloud security.
CloudPassage can be used by all employees, from junior-level engineers to the C-suite. For instance, DevOps and cloud security engineers can quickly review reports assist them in determining more secure, faster procedures and workflows.
In addition, cloud architects can apply the all-in-one solution to manage multiple layers of security quickly. The executives can create a better line of communication with DevOps teams by benefiting from data-intensive reports on audit compliance.
2. Qualys
It is one of the secure cloud security solution providers that has been in existence since 1999. Thus, proving them to be an efficient and reliable solution when it comes to data protection. It offers security to compliance assets and your devices, and other related services. Qualys aims at identifying compromise assets and assist in stopping the cybersecurity incidents from advancing.
Qualys security solution secures your web apps and devices and helps you remain compliant through complete cloud-only solutions. It assesses any threat data to ensure the safety of your system. The best part about Qualys is that it is entirely a cloud-based solution, hence no hardware or software requirements.
It comes with several features;
o It provides efficiency, protection and reliability both in private and public clouds, monitoring, protect threats, vulnerability management, and other utilities.
o It provides end-to-end security solutions such as endpoint security, DevSecOps, compliance, and other services. These ensure your teams remain in sync with each other.
3. Sitelock
The Sitelock solution was established in 2008. It secures more than 21 million websites across the world. It’s an efficient security solutions provider which protects sites from sneaky malware, security attacks, and various threats. Sitelocks regularly scan websites’ vulnerabilities and keep them secure from DDoS, XSS, and SQL attacks.
Sitelock tends to boost and enhance website performance through load balancing and dynamic caching, unlike other security solutions that negatively affect site performance. Thus, making it the best choice, especially for large corporations.
Apart from websites scanning and various security features, it offers emergency website repairs services. This assist business in reversing damages in case of a cyberattack, through repairing hacked websites.
4. Check Point CloudGuard
It is amongst the most trusted manufacturers and vendors of network firewalls and various security products. The company is based in Israel; it aims to build security solutions for any business in the market. CloudGuard as CheckPoint products secure multi-cloud environments. It’s a context-based cloud security engine supporting various cloud environments, including Vmware, AWS, Oracle, and Azure.
CloudGuard applies a unified approach in preventing threat and posture management from a unified platform instead of using multiple components of security control panels.
The security solution includes API protection to prevent malicious actors from abusing your services. Also, it comes with both public and private cloud monitoring and security and actively hunts for new threats on the horizon. Additionally, CloudGuard supports security for apps without servers and containerized ones.
It offers DevSecOps, which helps lessen attack service by allowing continuous and seamless integration of proper security practices with software development.
5. Proofpoint
It’s a cloud-based provider that leads in advanced cybersecurity solutions. It offers services that are customized to fit businesses of all sizes. It can protect both small and large corporations from cybersecurity threats. The good thing is that Proofpoint can tailor its services to meet your needs based on the type and size of business you are operating.
Proofpoint is known for providing efficient email security management features while offering security against various cybersecurity threats. Also, it secures outgoing data while ensuring nothing risky gets in. It protects mobile devices and social media. Additionally, it guarantees that it doesn’t contain any key to decrypting the information as it prevents data loss.
Its features include;
o Provide SaaS, email, security against attacks from email attachments, and mobile solutions from targeted cyber vulnerability.
o Despite their sizes, it protects essential and sensitive business data by offering cloud mail security solutions to all brands and businesses.
6. Threat Stack Security Platform
It is designed to protect your cloud and provide your team with the most concise and observable information. The solution aims at monitoring your security; this is known as “observability “in DevOps terms.
Although Threat Stack Platform mainly focuses on containerized cloud solutions. The platform functions on five layers of observability and monitoring; this includes container orchestration, the application., hosting server, customized cloud security management console, and the container itself.
The security solution helps teams identify any vulnerabilities before hackers do by providing observable securing shortcomings and suggestions. When a security incident arises, the Threat Stack Platform can assist the cloud security engineers in finding out what is happening much faster and give a quick and accurate response.
It tracks international regulatory and legal compliance, thus ensuring the customer is completely covered. Finally, this platform prides itself on having one primary focus: cloud security despite containerization.
7. CipherCloud
It’s a cloud security solution platform founded in 2010; it provides security solutions across three distinct models, including SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS. It offers a single platform that protects sensitive customer information across various public and private cloud applications without interference with the functionality or performance of the company website and assets.
It functions in the background across different private and public cloud applications. Two major strengths of CipherCloud include threat prevention and adaptive control.
CipherCloud best features include;
o It facilitates data loss prevention, complete cloud encryption gateway, cloud computing, and related security among various uses.
o CipherCloud offers services across multiple sectors such as government and telecommunication. Also, it safeguards crucial cloud applications, including Google Drive and One Drive.
8. The Symantec Cloud Workload Protection
There are various technologies for cloud security in the expansive Broadcom Symantec cybersecurity portfolio. One of them is Symantec Cloud Workload Protection that tends to discover automatically what a company is operating across multi-cloud deployments. However, this cloud protection goes beyond security. To support all major cloud computing platforms, mainly with “adapters” for their product.
Apart from cloud visibility, it integrates monitoring unauthorized changes, user activity, and file integrity. In short, Cloud protection Workload protects your workload instance running on popular cloud providers. To achieve this, you have to install an agent on every workload instance to monitor and enhance security policies to the instance.
When it comes to security, the Software comprises a three-pronged approach. Initially, it “listens” to outgoing and incoming traffic, then records all anomalies. Secondly, a recommendation engine analyzes the situations to provide real-time feedback and automatic reconfiguration to avoid any possible attack. Lastly, it responds by automatically dispersing whatever is necessary as long as it has permission.
The key feature of the CWP platform is that the agent controls and secures everything on the workload, including host-based IPS, zero-day threats, vulnerability protection, and file integrity monitoring.
9. Lacework
Lacework cloud security solution uses a top-down approach in safeguarding all cloud-based apps in all major platforms, whether containerized or not. It offers workload protection mainly for public cloud infrastructure. Also, this platform continuously monitors the cloud deployments for any change that might be a sign of potential attacks or misconfigurations.
The Lacework Polygraph develops a normal baseline behavior; this is applied later to determine potential behavior anomalies. Thus, allowing for detecting possible attacks even without a signature match. This type of functionality is crucial to establish the proper context for security.
Its overall infrastructure monitoring renders it easy for security Engineers to recognize shortcomings and immediately fix them. The alerts are quite informative due to artificial intelligence and don’t clog the developer’s inbox. They are ranked according to context and criticality.
It has a suite of applications to help with security. For instance, the developers can set compliance and legal requirements for the tool to scan frequently through the Configuration and Audit Control application.
In addition, users of this platform benefit from frequent reporting that offers insights into the risks and best practices—this assist in improving container and cloud workload security, vulnerability monitoring, and advanced threat protection. Lacework platform also has a unique feature known as DevSecOps; the tools make it easy to add cybersecurity to the workflow.
10. Cisco Cloud Security
It is designed for businesses that need reliable end-user security. Unlike most competitors who offer all-in-one solutions, Cisco allows teams to select and pick individual cloud security products and components to complete an already existing part of the security solution. It comprises two main security products; Cisco Cloudlock and Cisco Umbrella.
Cisco Umbrella offers security against recursive security attacks by a safe online gateway layered with a firewall. It also comprises of cloud access security broker; this is Software that carries out the role of a security mediator between the resources stored on the cloud and the user. Thus, allowing for the formulation of network security policies.
Cisco Umbrella contains another feature; software-defined wide-area networks that enhance application and security performance in a network. Also, it ensures temporary detention of hacked systems through analyzing threats over incoming connections and ports, then blocking them to avoid reaching the secured endpoints.
Additionally, Cisco Umbrella keeps gateway flags and logs malicious traffic. It achieves this by using IPsec tunnels that offer proxy chaining and virtualization capabilities to enhance security rules on incoming traffic.
The other primary product of Cisco is known as Cisco Cloudlock, which is designed to protect Software as a service (SaaS) application, Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) session through user and Entity Behavior Analytics, and email.
Cisco’s SaaS application security can be of help to teams who develop SaaS apps. They can quickly detect and thwart threats since Cisco offers real-time security alerts. Apart from security, the team can also benefit from AppDynamics, allowing developers to check resource metrics and performance.
With a combination of workload protection and multi-cloud network protection, all teams developing apps on private, public, and hybrid clouds can benefit. Additionally, Cisco offers email security and helps secure your remote employee’s machines and various tertiary security solutions.
Conclusion
There has been a significant concern for online security; the situation is even worse with the current technology, as cyberattacks are continuously rising. Running a business without cloud security solutions will only make it vulnerable to a wide range of online threats, all the way from minor data breaches to massive data theft and DDoS attacks.
Fortunately, cloud solution providers can assist in lowering the risks through monitoring network activities and controlling all threats. However, different cloud security products comprise various features and prices.
When selecting a complete security solution, identifying your particular needs is vital to choose a solution that best meets your needs. However, ensure that the solution you finally settle for provides adequate support and monitoring.
