How best to manage Cloud security

Grazed from SeaCoastOnline.  Author: MJ Shoer.

Moving business systems to the Cloud offers a lot of positives for most businesses. However, there are risks that need to be clearly understood so you don’t accidentally make your IT infrastructure more complicated to secure.As more businesses fall under some form of regulation, federal, state or local, you have to be aware of compliance requirements.

You also have to be prepared for audits, especially the unexpected kind. What I’m talking about here are not financial audits, but regulatory audits where officials come to your business and review your security policies and practices, specifically as they relate to how your team accesses your various systems and your ability to continue operations should those systems become unavailable. In the current climate, this is mostly focused on business with some form of consumer business as opposed to businesses that solely do business with other businesses, but expect that to change…

So what specifically am I talking about when it comes to making sure you are maintaining appropriate security controls? Consider this example. Your company has had a fairly traditional IT infrastructure over the last several year. You have a couple of servers in the server room. One may provide email, one may host the company database. Another may host all documents, spreadsheets, graphics and the shared printers used in the office. All of this is secured by a single username and password that you use to login each day. This account governs what you have access to and what you do not on this internal network…

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