To protect themselves against cyberattacks, developers and other businesses that are most frequently using private and public clouds need to focus on protecting themselves from harm at the workload level, not just at the endpoint.

In relation to this constantly growing problem, DZone listed several concerns, that every developer should take seriously to ensure their work is well-protected.

Streamline and Automation 

We are all aware that the rise in cloud computing has complicated workload security. Rather than employees at a single location being the only group permitted to access a company’s resources, access may span thousands of people across multiple sites all over the world.

However, many of the workload protection products lack identity management capabilities. This issue leaves a huge security gap. So, to prevent problems we need to have separate tools to identify a person’s identity and associated privileges when accessing cloud-stored information.

Maintain Data Privacy

Having information stored in multiple places could complicate efforts to keep it all secure.

Keeping privacy on the top list while making workload protection decisions is also vital since more places have enacted privacy laws. In fact, penalties for failing to adequately protect data can reach up to $5,000 per violation.

One method to maintain your data private is to implement controls for cloud-stored workloads, so that teams can include rules and policies for their specific companies. Developers should always apply additional controls depending on industry regulations and the type of data stored in the cloud.

Shared Responsibility of Workload Protection

One of the positive things about workload protection is that the responsibility does not all rest with a single party. The provider secures the cloud itself, but the customer takes responsibility for whatever is uploaded.

This leads to a lot of questions concerning protocols a cloud provider follows to protect against breaches, measures that data owners take when storing information or running workloads in the cloud environment, etc. Nailing this will ensure a more secure work environment.

Using Unnecessary Apps

One practical way to manage these risks is to limit the number of cloud-based apps employees use. Any unnecessary apps expand the overall attack surface size.

We should also carry out regular storage scans and security checks for all cloud-stored apps. Doing that allows identifying misconfigurations or errors that have publicly exposed data.

Premise Databases Checks

The results from recent research showed that 46% of them had vulnerabilities that made them prone to external attacks. One more worrying finding was that the average database had 26 unresolved issues, more than half of those had a “high” or “critical” severity level.

These concerns are just the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot more things that can threaten our information. To remain aware of our data protection we should stay on top of security threats regardless of where workloads reside.