What is Cloud Security Assessment & How to Implement

Considering the importance of cybersecurity, organizations must ensure having a secure cloud to store their data. To have this assurance, Cloud Security Assessment is a must.

This article explores Cloud Security Assessment (CSA), steps to implement it, and some tools that can help you with the process.

Part 1: What is Cloud Security Assessment?

It is the process of evaluating the level of security the cloud platform meets. It helps organizations monitor and improve their cloud systems as well as help them choose the right cloud service provider.

With the evaluation of security measures followed by the cloud platform, another important part of CSA is to validate whether those measures cover the specific use cases and requirements of an organization.

Part 2: How to Implement Cloud Security Assessment?

Overall, the main implementation of CSA includes the understanding of current infrastructure and security measures of the cloud, identification of the requirements based on your processes, implementation of those processes, and then re-testing the cloud infrastructure.

The detailed steps are as follows:

Be Clear About your Compliance Requirements

Your organization may require complying with some of the compliance standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and more to function in the industry. Identify your compliance requirements so you can find the cloud provider that also complies with the specified standards.

Identify cloud services and infrastructure

Dive deep into the infrastructure and security architecture of your cloud platform to understand its loopholes and strengths. It will help you in painting the bigger picture.

Identify Potential Threats

Generally, the cloud's functioning and processes could be complex to understand. However, it is important to investigate the potential vulnerabilities and threats associated with the cloud. Some of these threats can look like as follows:

● Security misconfigurations – Security loopholes in the settings of the cloud environment.

● Less to no visibility – Not having a clear picture of the whole ecosystem of the cloud platform.

● Insecure APIs – Improper security mechanisms implemented in the cloud APIs.

● No encryption – Allows access to sensitive data as it's not encrypted via security mechanisms.

● Ineffective authentication methods – Not having multiple and strong methods of user authentication.

● Missing DLP – Data Loss Prevention mechanisms are missing, making it impossible to recover data in case of loss.

● Monitoring not being transparent – Not providing the ability to monitor cloud activity and data, leaving room for security vulnerabilities.

Evaluate Existing Controls

With the identification of potential threats, it's also important to identify and jot down the existing security controls present in the cloud platform. These may include:

● Access control mechanisms

● Data encryption methods

● Network security protocols

Assess Third-Party Cloud Vendor Security

While you identify the potential vulnerabilities and controls of your cloud, it's important to perform research and understand what other third-party cloud platforms are providing. It will help in having a different perspective on the security and dynamics of your cloud by giving you a comparison standard for evaluation.

Record All Findings

Throughout the process, it's important to record all the findings so you can perform a comparative analysis to determine whether your platform is working per security standards and what potential changes you can make.

Prioritize Risks

After having your findings and listing potential risks posed by your cloud, you must prioritize them. It is because, without prioritization, every risk will seem to be dangerous enough for it to be resolved first. All this will only create chaos, without being able to get much done.

Create a Remediation Plan

Now that you have all the risks prioritized correctly, it's high time to draft a plan about how these changes can be implemented in your cloud. A comprehensive plan and clear issuance of responsibilities will make it easier for you to keep track of changes and measure their respective effectiveness.

Update Cloud Security Assessment Framework

After having a clear plan of action, start updating your cloud to cater to all the important requirements and mitigate as many risks as possible. Do consider that at times, it could be close to impossible to cater to all the requirements in your cloud. At that point, you need to assess the importance of the requirements. If not that important, you can let them go or else aim to change your cloud infrastructure completely.

Part 3: Cloud Security Assessment Checklist

Abide by the following cloud security assessment checklist to perform an effective security assessment of your cloud:

Part 4: Tools and techniques used in Cloud Security Assessment

The process of CSA can be optimized with the help of efficient tools and techniques. This section covers details of such tools, which include:

Vulnerability Scanners

These scanners allow you to scan your cloud for security vulnerabilities and identify all the potential security loopholes. This tool takes on the responsibility of the initial steps of cloud assessment itself, reducing the manual work for you.

Penetration Testing Tools

Cloud penetration testing, commonly known as pen testing, is another form of assessing the security level of the cloud. Under this test, the testers can have admin-level access, some knowledge of the cloud functioning, or no knowledge of the cloud ecosystem at all. Using this knowledge and their skills, they attempt to hack the cloud or part of it to unveil the security vulnerabilities in it and define remediation plans accordingly.

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Tools

These tools are responsible for the identification of misconfiguration issues in the cloud platform, along with the identification of compliance risks. This helps you understand the security gaps in your cloud platform and devise a plan of action to sort them out.

Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB)

CASB tools help govern regulatory compliance and monitor cloud activity across cloud applications and devices. These platforms are attached in between the sequence of cloud and cloud applications to help monitor the cloud activity for any potential security threats.

Log Analysis Tools

Log analysis, as the name suggests, looks into the logs generated by the network, applications, and servers to monitor all the activity of the cloud. They give you visibility of activity and performance of your cloud.

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS)

Cloud IDS is a system that alerts you in case of any detected intrusion or malware attack. These tools allow you to devise a better action plan by giving you visibility into the details of the attack in time.

Part 5: Key Benefits of Cloud Security Risk Assessment

To get started with the key benefits, we must remember that to have a successful and efficient IT infrastructure, security must exist at its core. And cloud is the warehouse of an organization for all the sensitive and important data.

Considering all this, some of the key benefits of cloud security risk assessment are as follows:

● It helps ensure that your data is processed and transported per the regulatory compliance requirements.

● It helps identify the potential security risks and vulnerabilities in time, improving your incident management approach.

● It helps save your organization from financial and reputational damage by keeping security and standard procedures in place.

Bringing it all together, if your organization is using the cloud to store its data, the cloud security assessment is an important practice and must be in place. As highlighted above in the article, you can also make use of tools to help optimize this process.