Five Best Practices to Secure Cloud Access

Overview

CIEM (Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management), an automated cloud security and cloud governance practice, helps enterprises to mitigate the risk of data breaches in public cloud environments. It continuously monitors the permissions and activity of entities (such as users, applications, and service accounts) within your cloud environment. It ensures that they operate within appropriate access controls in IaaS environment. CIEM practice prevents excessive permissions from being granted after analyzing entitlements and maintains the principle of least privilege, reducing the attack surface. Moreover, an effective CIEM practice provides comprehensive reporting that streamlines access management, strengthens cloud security posture, and minimizes disruptions in DevOps processes.

As a result, despite economic uncertainties, enterprises are continuing with their cloud adoption to stay competitive and fulfill digital transformation strategies. Indeed, nowadays, almost three out of four businesses adopt cloud/ multi-cloud platforms. It helps enterprises to meet the requirements arising from increasing daily IT IaaS, operational and infrastructure use cases through various cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

The question here is how to govern the identities and access control mechanisms effectively and securely across these cloud/ multi-cloud environments. It is not just human identities that need to be protected, but machine identities/non-human identities (devices and cloud workloads such as scripts, containers, VMs, CI/CD tools, RPA tools) must be controlled and governed.

How does ARCON help in Reinforcing CIEM practices?

ARCON offers a highly effective cloud entitlements management and governance solution – ARCON | Cloud Governance to build a robust security framework in cloud/ multi-cloud platforms. Here are five core security functionalities that give an extra edge to this cloud solution:

• Centralized Solution: It offers a centralized platform to manage, monitor and control the increasing number of identities spread across multiple platforms. It ensures complete visibility over every end-user and non-human identity access. The centralized dashboard is interactive and offers comprehensive overview of various identities available across the multiple cloud platforms including an ability to govern the cloud entities, enabling administrators to easily identify and manage risky entities.
• Entitlements Management: The solution empowers IT administrators and enterprise security staff to have comprehensive control over the entitlements and workloads in both single and multi-cloud instances. It strengthens the security fabric on cloud as administrators can define the policies and permissions for distinct entities wanting to access files, workloads, databases, management consoles, services, servers, containers, and other cloud resources.
• Control of Over-Entitlements: The overprivileged users with excessive entitlements are controlled by ARCON | Cloud Governance. Over-entitlements in a multi-cloud environment could jeopardize cloud security as they increase the chances of unauthorized access and anomalous activities. Misuse of over-privileged rights in the cloud environment could invite unprecedented IT threats. It controls over-entitlements by following the ‘Least Privilege’ principle.
• Provisioning or Deprovisioning of Privileges: This solution offers robust governance engine for identity lifecycle management, ensuring provisioning and deprovisioning of privileges. It also enforces strong accountability so that the situation never goes out of control. It comes with pre-built integrations with an array of SaaS platforms such as GitLab, Okta, Salesforce, Atlassian, Office 365, and Dropbox to accelerate cloud adoption.
• Compliance with IT Standards: Deployment of ARCON | Cloud Governance indirectly helps enterprises to comply with the mandates of global regulations and IT standards that demand stringent compliance as to data protection, data integrity, data security such as FedRAMP, NIST, GDPR, American Institute for of Certified Public Accountants SOC for cybersecurity.

Conclusion

The acceptance and proliferation of cloud technologies necessitates the adherence to more cloud security practices. Deploying ARCON | Cloud Governance can yield several IT security benefits in modern enterprises by simplifying and securing cloud entitlement processes and practices.