Are cloud security risks keeping you up at night? Cyber criminals are a serious threat that cannot be ignored. They’re targeting every possible weakness and constantly evolving to make their threats more damaging. But you don’t have to be a victim.

The Human Error Factor

According to Crowd Research Partners, 90% of cyber security professionals are worried about cloud security. Their top challenges include leakage, threats to data privacy, data loss, and confidentiality breaches. The weak link is often found to be human error, which is why bringing in tools to prevent cloud security risks from becoming a true nightmare has become so important. In fact, the cloud security market is expected to grow exponentially through 2024.

Cyber criminals are lurking, waiting on someone within your organization to mess up, at which point they’ll pounce — and it happens often. For example, if you misconfigure your cloud settings, you’re opening yourself to an attack. If you make it easy to view login credentials, you’re basically asking to be hacked. Furthermore, if it’s standard practice for you to hard-code your credentials into programs, you’re probably going to experience a breach.

Address the Weaknesses

First and foremost, address your password hygiene. This is low hanging fruit for hackers, and too many organizations aren’t doing enough to educate employees about password hygiene. Inform them about strong password usage and hold them accountable.

In fact, education should be an ongoing process due to the frequent landscape changes. Everyone needs to be aware of where cloud security risks lie, and security awareness training is, therefore, a high-ranking priority.

Sensitive data deserves more attention. Not only is it often stored in the wrong places, but too many people have access to it. Controlling access can bolster security. Organizations that get it right often set up back channels for critical data as an extra layer of protection.

Social media can also be a vulnerable situation in the workplace. Part of your education program should involve best practices where social media usage is concerned.

Be Thorough

Security controls are essential, but if you’re only partially applying them, you’re leaving yourself open. Furthermore, some controls are incorrectly applied, which is usually a case of not fully understanding vectors. A thorough approach will often deter phishing attacks, but more often than not, it’s a lack of employee education that allows them to fall for attacks that compromise the network.

At eXemplify, we connect our clients with managed security solutions that offer a comprehensive approach to security and reinforce network protection. If you’re looking for more security flexibility for all types of networks and need advanced integration of machine learning, contact us and let’s talk about how we can provide you with better cloud security solutions.