What Is Cloud Data Protection? Important, Challenges and Best Practices

What is Cloud Data Protection?

Cloud data protection refers to a set of data storage and security features designed to protect sensitive data in a cloud-based environment. Data in motion is the term used to describe data that has been moved. The term “data protection” is used to describe the copying of data, not just its “security”. Data security is meant to protect sensitive data from being accessed or distributed by unauthorized parties.

Why is Cloud Data Protection Important?

As on-premises infrastructure and applications move to the cloud, the IT role has changed from one of local cybersecurity to that of a global business enabler. Strong IT allows for hybrid cloud and multi-cloud adoption as well as data dissemination while preventing exposure of data and maintaining increasingly strict industry and government regulations.

IT leaders look to cloud-based data protection platforms for this purpose. These platforms provide unified capabilities across the internet, data center, and SaaS applications. This ensures that public cloud applications are configured according to best practices in order to avoid data exposure and maintain regulatory compliance.

The shared responsibility model ensures that enterprises and cloud providers alike are motivated to protect data at all costs. there is an initiative shared by both sides, so to speak.

Also read: Top 10 Companies for Cloud Data Protection

How is Data Protected in the Cloud?

Cloud data is usually protected by methods like backups, disaster recovery, and cloud storage. These are all designed to ensure data remains in an organization’s hands even if there is a breach of malware, a data loss, or other events that could exploit the vulnerability.

Data protection is also achieved by using authentication, access control, and secure deletion, but these methods are more about data security rather than data protection. These methods are used by organizations to either keep negligent or malicious users away from the data or to completely protect it from them.

Standard security policies also play a part in preventing data breaches. Cloud workloads are especially vulnerable. It’s therefore important that both organizations and cloud service providers fully understand the implications of their partnership in order to reduce overall data risk.

Cloud Data Protection Challenges

Cloud computing offers many benefits for businesses, but it is not easy to keep cloud data secure. Cloud data protection is not without its challenges.

• Encryption: According to Google Transparency Report mid-2022 data, 95% percent of traffic Google receives is encrypted. If your data protection solution does not classify and control the data in encrypted traffic you will miss most sessions where data exposure and misuse are a possibility. This is particularly true for SaaS applications, which rely on encrypted, secure connections to exchange data.
• Protection Gaps: Tools like cloud access security brokers, secure web gateways, and cloud security posture managers provide partial views of data protection in your organization. However, there are gaps that exist between products and teams. This can lead to increased complexity, redundant tasks across teams, as well as a lack of visibility and control of data exposure.
• Limited visibility and control: Data protection solutions with limited visibility and control can help you to make informed decisions regarding cloud data usage. It’s impossible for granular controls to be offered without full context – who is trying to access the data, where the user is located, and the current state of the application.
• Poor User Experience: Redirecting internet traffic through security devices within your legacy infrastructure can slow down application performance, frustrate users and be costly. Adding enough appliances to increase performance is also impractical and expensive. Legacy architectures were not designed to accommodate sudden increases in remote accessibility during crises, or a growing workforce that works from anywhere.

How to Protect Data in Cloud Environments

Cloud data protection solutions should be designed from the ground up for performance and scalability. It should be a global platform to ensure that your users can always access their applications. This relies on a strong network of partners to provide optimal performance and reliability for users.

You should seek out solutions that will help you create a zero-trust framework to ensure comprehensive cloud data security. Zero trust allows you to address the specific cloud security issues your organization faces by using context, including user, device, and application information, before making a connection.

Cloud services can increase your organization’s flexibility. Zero trust gives you the power to protect your data and resources from cyber threats that are hungry for information.

Also read: What is Data Recovery: A Guide to Cloud Backup Solution

Benefits of Cloud Data Protection

Solid data protection programs:

• Enhances security of data and applications By increasing the visibility of your cloud application architecture and cloud data protection, your organization can strengthen security across all aspects of the cloud – even for remote users and hybrid users.
• Irons out access governance If you follow best practices and implement a cloud-based data protection program, only users who meet your context guidelines can access the data. Data is therefore governed by its access policies.
• Supports regulatory compliance As data volumes increase around the globe, regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA enforce strict guidelines on how data is used. Cloud data protection can help you achieve them.

Cloud Data Protection Best Practices

When building a protection plan, many organizations fail to do their research. This leads to complications after the initial stages are completed. Follow these best practices to avoid becoming one of those businesses.

Take Stock of Sensitive Data

Right? You’d like to know in advance how much cash you intend to store in a vault (or transport with an armored vehicle). It is important to protect the sensitive data that your organization has created. When putting together your program, you will have an advantage if you know which data to protect, how to protect it, and where to find it.

Pair Encryption and Authentication

Authentication alone can be a good way to protect cloud resources and your data, but hackers are able to easily impersonate other users and gain access to the data. Encryption scrambles your data using randomly generated encryption keys to give you an additional layer of security.

Select a Trusted Provider

Many data protection vendors promise to secure your cloud data in a manner that no one else can. Only one vendor, however, builds data protection specifically for the cloud. It uses a zero-trust framework to protect data between cloud transactions and collaborates with cloud compliance organizations in order to ensure that you are compliant. .