Cloud misconfiguration is a pervasive problem that leads to the leaking of private and sensitive information. This is a significant occurrence to be monitored at all points. Many companies have been plagued because of the occurrence of identity misconfiguration. If you want to know more, you can click here to read.

An exclusive art and crafts retailer had left 138 GB worth of private customer information in their public AWS bucket. This led to a huge exposition of personally identifiable information of more than 300,000 customers, including their phone numbers, names, payment card information, and more. This incident, however, is not uncommon. 

How to Keep Your Company Safe

As identity misconfiguration has become an extremely threatening and consequential element of every company, much effort is put into identifying and finding remedies for this issue. You can click here to read and learn how you can ensure better security for your cloud environment:

Create Templates and Policies 

Companies need to propagate security settings permanently into the base configuration settings. It means that this cloud infrastructure can, in turn, benefit from what had happened in the past. If you ignore this problem, the misconfigured basic structure can end up creating more trouble than you can afford. 

For this reason, you must transform the best security practices into permanent templates and policies that have to be followed at all times. Even when an organization is under pressure and needs to put huge workloads into the cloud, it must keep the security protocols in mind. 

Keep the Old Developments in Mind 

Every company needs to make development and offer new services from time to time. It adds more data to the cloud server, which needs to be configured to make sure that it runs smoothly.

However, it often may occur that these services are never rechecked for their configuration. Such forgotten cloud assets can lead to huge security problems in the future and have to be dealt with in due time. 

Use Automation

Automation services are now being employed for conducting work in almost all sectors. With various agile methodologies like DevSecOps, automation is extensively used by developers to not only create but also deploy secret codes. The most interesting aspect of automated systems is that they can detect malfunctions and misconfigurations in real-time. Still, they can also fix them as soon as possible. 

While this is a highly creative solution, companies need to check and recheck the security infrastructure regularly. However, manual detection is not an option anymore, and other recent methods have to be adopted. You can hence do this with the help of automated services that many companies are adopting worldwide. 

Common Cloud Misconfigurations

Cloud misconfiguration can lead to a significant loss for a particular company. Some of the most common misconfigurations can easily be avoided by following some simple safety protocols. While it is essential to understand and identify the misconfiguration at once, companies perform some common mistakes. They include:

● API keys
● Secrets encryption and management
● VPC constraints and Storage access 
● User privilege escalation and additional permissions 
● Storage constraints for storage access
● Infrequent monitoring and logging

Addressing Cloud Misconfiguration

Once you understand the most common misconfiguration, you can address them from time to time. Click here to read more:

● It is not easy for companies to figure out who has access to their cloud. There are many instances where cloud access was granted to unlikely members by mistake. It has to be taken care of, and access to the cloud should be provided only to top-ranking and skilled employees. 
● Cloud services are incredibly varied, which means that responsibilities are also quite versatile. Employees need to understand their responsibilities concerning a particular cloud service. Regular meetings and defined job roles are of extreme importance here. 
● Data on the cloud has to be encrypted at all times. Often sensitive and personal files are left unencrypted in the cloud, which makes it very unsafe. 
● You have to make sure that an in-depth defense system is provided and monitored at all times. Security hygiene must be performed when it comes to cloud-based data because it can easily be leaked or hacked into. Companies must find creative solutions to keep their cloud safe by employing the right software solutions. 

The only way you can save your company from cloud misconfiguration is by building your defenses even before a threat can come your way. You need to understand the infrastructure of your company and take appropriate actions. Test and retest your automation at all times for optimizing cloud security.