by Dima Tatur, Head Of Cyber Security Department at Comm-IT and Joe Brown, Content Strategist

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Cloud computing is the backbone of modern technology. It continues to evolve and develop, and all the while, cyber hackers have not stood around idly. If anything, the opposite is true. All forms of cyber attacks, from DDoS attacks and ransomware to exploitation of services and data theft, have become more complex and more frequent. And so, companies using cloud services need to address vulnerabilities and potential threats by adopting appropriate and rigid tools of data management and privacy, such as those provided by AWS.

The main problem today is securing cloud infrastructure. Whether hardening, configuring jump host servers, managing firewalls or handling intrusion detection, vulnerability scanning or anti-virus updates, this is something all companies should and do take seriously. But with the growing number and types of threats, this is not an easy task for your company. For instance, penetration testing and handling firewalls require different talents. Also, 24/7 monitoring means extra staff costs, who need to be trained in the appropriate technologies. Moreover, the ongoing learning required to keep up with the changes means additional personnel costs, and then additional reimbursement, causing your costs to continually grow as the threats continue to loom.

Managed Security Services Providers(MSSPs), such as Comm-IT, can provide the perfect answer to this issue.  With highly trained staff, they keep up to date on the latest developments.  They can afford to have on staff experts from a wide variety of expertise. And because they monitor a number of clients simultaneously, they are host to Network Operations Centers (NOC) and Security Operation Centers (SOC) which protect their customers’ data and apps around the clock.

Your cloud environment requires hardened protection. MSSP’s centrally manage this aspect of your environment, hardening it from cyber attacks. For instance, they can use the AWSCloud Trail and AWS CloudWatch to monitor your metrics, utilize AWS Config to allow only hardened Amazon EC2 instances to be created and establish the rules for access via AWS Identify and Access Management (IAM) and AWS Key Management Services (KMS).

Also, with the latest Network Performance Management (NPM) tools, they will reduce your organization's risks when dealing with cyber incidents, and help you integrate multi-faceted access (MFA), data verification and with both writing and implementing cloud environment security policies.