By: Brian DeVault
When you have cloud services on-premises it is vital to make sure that your organization’s technical architecture is secure to prevent hackers from stealing your organization’s data. If you are one of the few organizations in the world that has that expertise and skill set in house, consider yourself very lucky, but most organizations take a head in the sand approach and simply assume everything is fine until disaster strikes.
One simple way to truly find out if your organization’s cloud on-prem is secure is to hire a Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) to perform an assessment of your environment and produce a report to reveal the weaknesses in your security.
Vulnerability Assessment
Bringing in an outside security vendor to assess the weaknesses in your cloud environment typically results in a vulnerability assessment report that uncovers avenues that attackers can use to infiltrate your system and steal data. This report is a powerful tool that also serves as a roadmap to help you prioritize what fixes need to be made first, as well as the time and money it will take to make these changes. Many times this requires a full re-architecting of your on-prem solution to eliminate vulnerability.
Many of the weaknesses uncovered in a vulnerability assessment are novel in nature, but many times the things uncovered are seen again and again across a wide range of industries. Things like not having multi-factor authentication (MFA) enabled or not having a zero-trust architecture in place are common security failures that your MSSP will uncover and work with your company to fix before they are exploited and used against you. Many industries also have specific compliance requirements for their systems that your MSSP will take into consideration before proposing or implementing any changes to your existing systems.
The Illusion Of Security
Unfortunately, the reason that data breaches are increasing at such an alarming rate is because many business leaders are not doing enough to protect their customers and organizations, including the bare minimum for security practices. Our company, NETRIO, is often hired by billion dollar corporations to perform vulnerability assessments and to secure their cloud on-prem solutions and the things that we find are often very alarming.
One organization that we assessed was so utterly lacking in security that it could have been literally minutes before their system was infiltrated if we had not sprung to action to secure their system. Fortunately, they had the sense to bring in an outside party to judge their security without any bias. It is absolutely a certainty that they would have become victim to an intrusion that could have cost millions of dollars and a major lost in consumer trust if they had not acted when they did.
This blog post is part of NETRIO’s weekly Whiteboard Wednesday series. Follow along on Linkedin and YouTube each week as Brian and Mike discuss use cases, new technology, and trends.
