How to Protect Data Stored in the Cloud

Cloud has quickly become a buzz word in IT and many companies are using the Cloud in one form or another. The most common use of the Cloud is for storage because it is much more convenient than traditional storage and many people believed it was more secure. With recent news coming out about files saved to the Cloud being compromised the question needs to be asked: How do you protect the data you have saved to the cloud?

One of the leading forces in Cloud data protection is Symantec. Their flagship product line, Symantec Endpoint Protection 14 provides comprehensive data security to protect your devices, and Symantec Endpoint Protection Cloud allows you to manage your users and devices security without a host server. Symantec also offers discounted pricing for 501c3 Non-Profit Organizations, with Symantec Endpoint Protection 14 for 501c3 Non-Profit Organizations.

I’ve included some excerpts from the Symantec blog below with more info on the best practices for maintaining secure cloud data: The reality is that a secure cloud environment like Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers many organizations far better security than they can afford on their own. As Curt Dukes, executive vice president for Security Best Practices, for the non-profit Center for Internet Security (CIS), says, “Companies with limited resources and budget should actually consider moving to the cloud to benefit from stronger security and compliance. Equipment is monitored, and access to the premises of data centers is heavily secured.”

The truth is no different for enterprise scale organizations. Cloud is intrinsically as safe, and especially given today’s expanding digital threat landscape, safer and more secure than your own on-premise data centers.

Perhaps most important for an organization is to ensure that their cloud security solution provides automated security. It needs to be baked into the infrastructure so that it automatically monitors the organization’s data wherever it lives and goes in the cloud. The dynamic nature of cloud and modern cloud-native applications makes this a necessity. Another best practice is to adopt a Zero Trust approach to protecting workloads and securing access. A Zero Trust approach that is identity-centric and based on data classification. This makes it much easier for your organization to monitor and track data in real-time and conversely, much more difficult for hackers to infiltrate and do damage. And finally, a third best practice is to ensure that your cloud security solution addresses malware too.

Given that misconfiguration errors are the cause of the vast majority of cloud security failures, avoiding these mistakes is also a primary focus of our joint Amazon and Symantec cloud security recommendations. There are three cloud security misconfiguration errors that are the biggest to avoid because they are the source of most cloud security breaches. They are:

• Leaving default settings unchanged, creating open access for hackers to exploit.
• Open cloud storage buckets that enable bucket access permission errors.
• Stolen credentials that compromise access keys -- granting hackers full access.

Use the best practices detailed above to keep your cloud data secure and consider Symantec Endpoint Protection 14 for 501c3 Non-Profit Organizations to receive the highest ranked antivirus and endpoint protection available at an affordable Non-Profit rate.

Genesis Technologies provides software discounts to 501c3 Non-Profit Organizations. We have a small team that is always ready to help or answer questions about any of our products. If you would like to learn more about any of the products mentioned above, feel free to hop on our LiveChat App, or give us a call at 1-800-433-6326.