The cloud has been widely adopted by businesses across a myriad of sectors and has practically become a requirement in the ‘work from home’ era, with the largest organizations in the world running most of their applications, platforms, and infrastructure on the cloud. However, in the rush to adopt these modern systems, many companies have overlooked implementing effective cybersecurity protocols to protect them, which is leading to danger.
From small e-commerce retailers to giant legacy banks, there are several benefits that come from moving information and systems into a cloud network. Chiefly, the cloud offers more data storage to allow more business-critical information to be retained. Additionally, cloud-based systems can provide additional processing power to businesses to enable essential tasks to be completed more efficiently.
Broadly speaking, migrating to the cloud helps companies to create new efficiencies across a wide range of important processes. Amidst uncertain economic times, it’s a move that can help businesses to save time, resources, and money. However, cloud migration comes with a distinct set of security risks that companies also need to be aware of. What’s more, these risks must be considered before the migration process is allowed to begin.
ASSESSING THE THREAT
The cloud is like any other digital network and so to keep it safe, it must be supported with effective cybersecurity protocols. Unfortunately, this remains something that some businesses overlook, which has created ample opportunities for cybercriminals to exploit. What’s more, as criminals become more accustomed to breaching this type of system, the risk intensifies, which creates a concerning cycle of escalating threats.
That’s why businesses must be more cognisant than ever of the threats around cloud migration, and aware of preventative measures, which can help to protect them from the danger. In light of this concern, many companies now find themselves asking how they can best bolster cybersecurity measures in the cloud. There are a variety of appropriate answers, however, some of them are certainly more effective than others.
An important aspect of the wider cybersecurity landscape is financial crime and fraud. There are early signs that the spheres of cybersecurity, cybercrime, fraud and financial crime are starting to converge. If you’re trying to protect your organizations and their assets in the cloud, then one of the key defenses you’ll need to implement is how to ensure an organization or its customers don’t fall victim to fraud or fincrime.
When looking to properly protect cloud-based solutions, businesses must try to strike a balance between security and user-friendliness. If not, companies risk forfeiting many of the time and cost efficiencies, which they initially adopted these forms of systems to generate. Therefore, the first task for many businesses undertaking the cloud migration process is to qualify the specific risk of the data and assets they intend to upload. For example, you want the high-value customer to be able to sign up for your new credit card very easily with as little friction as possible. At the same time, you want to inspect a credit card application from an email address that has only existed for 1 day, behind a VPN, from an aggressive nation-state on an unrecognised device with no social media accounts.
Next, companies must assess what represents the most unobtrusive security solution in helping to overcome this challenge. Assessing the first part of that equation is often dictated by the scale and nature of the business in question. It should be said that the cybersecurity risks of migrating data online aren’t always uniform. Some data is particularly sensitive and must have stringent measures in place to protect it.
KNOWING THE CHALLENGE
Right now, around 83% of companies say they don’t encrypt sensitive information stored in the cloud. When you consider other research, which highlights that 60% of all businesses currently use cloud-based services, you begin to realise how much sensitive data is currently unprotected. Hypothetically, the vast majority of this data could be accessed by fraudsters, which would create huge challenges.
If this were to happen, it’s highly likely that valuable information and sensitive data would be stolen from the system and used to extort the business in question. More recently, there’s also been a wave of cyber hackers using compromised accounts and systems in the cloud to mine cryptocurrencies. This form of hack can severely diminish the computing resources of cloud solutions and prevent systems from performing at an optimal level. These kinds of “data signals” such as compromised accounts can be fed into risk scoring engines, machine learning models or enrich existing data to help prevent the breach from happening.
Hope is at hand though, modern fincrime platforms provide the ability to identify and distinguish fraudsters and cyber criminals from good customers very early on (often when they first land on a website) using digital footprint analysis and “pre fraud” risk identification using a number of signals from other cloud and application providers. Combined with technologies such as device fingerprinting and machine learning across large fin crime datasets, the identification of fraudsters trying to commit a financial crime or hackers trying to breach a system can be made much more sophisticated and detect issues “at source” when that actor (good or bad) first lands on a website or app.
Likewise, ransomware attacks in the cloud are on the rise and increasingly used to render entire cloud-based systems inaccessible. Regardless of their form, cyberattacks in the cloud often incapacitate businesses and can cost a lot to fix. As always, it’s far cheaper to put measures in place to prevent the issue from occurring in the first instance than it costs to mend the problem once it’s happened. By identifying the risk of fraud or breach as early as possible, the risk of cyber attack or fincrime can be dramatically reduced.
KEEPING YOUR CLOUD SAFE
One of the most powerful techniques available to ensure effective cybersecurity measures in the cloud is the ‘Zero Trust’ model. This model flips conventional cybersecurity on its head, assuming that the system in question has been compromised and challenging users to prove that they are not the infiltrators. The approach may seem harsh at first, but it can dramatically reduce the risk of hacks, or data losses within cloud storage systems.
With this model in place, businesses can respond more quickly to emerging threats. By continually requiring verification from users, ‘Zero Trust’ systems offer a proactive approach, allowing organisations to stay ahead of potential threats and bad actors. However, to ensure this approach doesn’t adversely affect productivity levels, businesses must implement verification measures that can be completed quickly by trusted parties. The idea of making digital identity verification early on in the customer journey and as invisible as possible to customers means that a “pre-fraud” check is based on digital footprint vs a more complex and expensive KYC or a full identity check. This can help ensure that good customers have a great experience, while the bad actors also get spotted quickly.
Establishing a ‘Zero Trust’ model is an effective way to guarantee effective security within cloud-based applications and storage. However, the need to protect businesses from online crime and fraud extends far beyond this alone. Most businesses need to take a holistic approach to cybersecurity, implementing different methods and techniques to contend with several specific, separate challenges, such as online fraud, which is increasingly prevalent.
Fortunately, by partnering with a genuine expert, like SEON, businesses are able to reduce the risks of online fraud as effectively as they can reduce security issues in the cloud with a ‘Zero Trust’ model. Powered by an AI-driven system, our modular solution offers quick and reliable results, which can help businesses to identify potential fraudsters in a novel, data-driven manner thus nullifying their threat.
