To protect your company against a security vulnerability in the Cloud – which can prove costly, it is essential to understand and to meet the compliance requirements linked to your business.
Compliance (conformité in French) is one of the main reasons why many organisations hesitate to commit fully to a Cloud strategy. A clear understanding of how compliance can be achieved does, however, make it possible to take advantage of the agility and the growth made possible by Cloud Providers.
To help you see things more clearly, let us look together at:
- what is meant by compliance in the Cloud
- the importance of ensuring the compliance of your information system (IS)
- The advice for strengthening your security
- How to put compliance in place with BAM.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- What is Compliance (Conformité)?
- Why is compliance in the Cloud important?
- What does the shared responsibility principle in the Cloud consist of?
- 8 tips to ensure your compliance
Compliance in the Cloud brings together a certain number of regulatory standards of use, standards imposed by national and/or international institutions.
In other words, to be compliant in the Cloud, the Cloud Provider services used by your organisation must meet all the requirements, in particular:
- Industry standards such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard ( PCI DSS )
- Laws such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
- Any internal governance policy that a company creates in order to reach its goals and objectives.
- The government or international standards linked to your lines of business.
Why is compliance in the Cloud important?
This compliance concerns your infrastructure as much as your data.
Around your infrastructure, several aspects come into play in compliance: access and identity control, data sharing, backups, incident processes…
On the question of data storage and management, a company must understand its own role and its responsibility in ensuring the security of the data.
In 2022, according to Statista, more than 60% of all corporate data was stored in the Cloud. This volume has doubled since 2015.
Failure to meet Cloud requirements can lead to costly data breaches. In 2022, the average cost of a data breach reached a record level of 4.35 million dollars, according to IBM’s annual report on the cost of a data breach.
Cloud compliance can help you enjoy the benefits of Cloud computing (cost-effectiveness, data backup and restoration, scalability) while maintaining solid security.
What does the shared responsibility principle in the Cloud consist of?
Many organisations make the mistake of assuming that once the data has been sent to the Cloud, all the responsibility for security is entirely transferred to the Cloud provider. It is not that simple.
If you have deployed your infrastructure on a provider (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, etc.), the shared responsibility principle applies to the implementation of this compliance. Put plainly: the Cloud Provider is responsible for the security of the services provided. As a user, you are responsible for the use of those services, for the applications you install on them, for the processing of the data, and for the flows of information exchange.
8 tips to ensure your compliance
Identify the regulations and the guidelines
The first step towards achieving compliance in the Cloud is to identify the regulations and the industry standards with which your organisation must comply. There are several of them: ISO 27001, SOC2, HIPPA, PCI CSS…
Understand the unique requirements of your Cloud environment
In addition to the shared responsibility for security, the service and the deployment model of a Cloud environment have an impact on the security requirements. The most common services are infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). The most common deployment models are public, private and hybrid.
For example, in a PaaS environment, the administrator is responsible for the applications while the Cloud Provider is responsible for the physical servers, the physical network, the hypervisor and the operating systems.
To make sure that you are following best practices in security and compliance, you must understand the unique risks and requirements of your Cloud environment.
Ensure adequate access control
Companies must establish a policy to limit and grant access to their Cloud environment and to the data stored in it. To do this, you can introduce standards-based access rules and expiry dates to help you know who has access and for how long.
Classify your data
When it comes to storing data in the Cloud, it is important to know where the servers are located geographically speaking, because regulations are governed locally.
Once you have chosen a provider, you must determine the types of data you wish to host. You can do this by classifying your data.
Data classification is the process of sorting data into different categories. This helps companies to manage, secure and store their data more easily.
Encrypt all the sensitive data that exists in the Cloud
According to the Thales Global Cloud Security Study 2021, the vast majority (83%) of companies still fail to encrypt half of the sensitive data they store in the Cloud, although 40% revealed that they had faced a breach of their information system over the past year.
Encryption is essential in order to protect sensitive data. Encryption helps you meet most compliance requirements such as PCI DSS and GDPR.
Your Cloud provider may offer encryption services, but do not forget that it always falls to the company to protect the data while it is being moved and while it is stored.
Carry out regular internal audits
One of the best ways of uncovering security flaws and vulnerabilities is to carry out regular internal security audits, or even to automate them thanks to the tools provided by the Cloud Providers.
Review your Cloud compliance regularly to make sure that it meets the regulatory requirements. It is also recommended that you keep up to date with the updates to those requirements so that you can make adjustments proactively.
Prepare for, and do not forget, the external audits
These external audits are mandatory. They are imposed by industry standards. You have to know how to anticipate them in order to spare your team a possible emotional shock.
Choose a partner of choice
Such as Premaccess with its BAM solution to administer your information systems and ensure a level of compliance linked to the standards of your industry.
To obtain a demo of this solution:
Contact us
Sources: