Four of the five top cybersecurity threats for SMBs in the cloud are commonly overlooked, according to Bitdefender’s Business Insights blog.
In the article, Bitdefender‘s Bob Violino notes that most SMBs are concerned about data breaches and unauthorised access.
However, cloud misconfiguration, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), account hijacking and insecure application programming interfaces (APIs) are also commonplace causes of security issues, he says.
“More SMBs are placing a greater amount of data in the cloud, including data that can be considered highly sensitive such as information related to customer transactions,” Violino points out.
“If SMBs are not aware of these threats and taking steps to mitigate the risk, they might end up becoming the latest victims of a data breach or other attack.”
Security for cloud computing services and applications has become critical, whether the department in question is simply supporting daily business functions, software development, or the entire IT support infrastructure on which modern businesses rely.
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) top threats working group has argued for better understanding of best practice in cloud security.
“Tools such as access management and control, endpoint security, and encryption, among others, are vital for helping to protect data in the cloud,” writes Violino.
At a basic level, SMBs sometimes don’t properly implement security settings for their cloud platforms — resulting in a high level of vulnerability due to unencrypted data, insecure password choices, mismanaged permission control and more.
“Random changes to settings can also cause misconfigurations,” adds Violino.
Violino quotes the CSA approvingly: “An absence of effective change control is a common cause of misconfiguration in a cloud environment.
“Cloud environments and cloud computing security methodologies differ from traditional IT in ways that make changes more difficult to control.”
Bitdefender makes and supplies a wide range of comprehensive cybersecurity software for consumers, homes, and businesses.
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