Adapting to and mastering the digital landscape is imperative for the survival of any business, and neglecting to do it will probably lead to a loss of mindshare and market share in today’s ultra-competitive and hyper-connected world. One key component of this new digital landscape is the cloud. While many believe it is just another data storage platform, it is so much more than that.
Often considered a rather complicated task, here are five areas you can focus on to start your cloud perimeter journey today:
1. Establish Effective Monitoring and Reporting
Cyberattacks are often induced from within. From access, to applications, and data, to malicious and unacceptable content, to application performance, everything should be monitored, logged, and reported. Full visibility is the first step to effectively applying security policy and enforcing compliance.
2. Establish New Access Policies
IT must pivot from the common security mantra of “trust but verify” to “verify and never trust” in the new threat landscape. Solutions like VPNs put a hole through your firewall, enabling anyone inside of your perimeter to potentially move laterally across your network.
Most users only need access to the applications that enable them to successfully do their jobs. This ensures the network remains protected from unauthorized or malicious activity. As you think about potentially utilizing a cloud perimeter for access controls and enforcing security policies, you should consider asking yourselves the following questions:
• How often do your users work remotely?
• Should they have full, unfettered network access?
• Is the user an employee or another member of the ecosystem?
• What device types are they using?
Evaluating user access is the best way to start the transition to a cloud perimeter.
3. Perform a Health Check on Your Existing Security Controls
Existing security controls are outmatched and reactive rather than proactive. The harsh truth is that the current layers that form a company’s data security aren’t protective and aided to match the cyber crime tactics.
It is advisable to perform a complete health check on your existing security solutions with advanced threat detection and prevention technology to see what your systems might be missing. Once you’ve completed a health check, you can determine the appropriate plan of action.
4. Update Your Application Delivery Model to Offload Your Network and Improve End-User Performance
An enterprise network should be able to accommodate instant, on-demand entry into new regions, peaks in traffic, a diverse user base, and increasingly complex application design. It should allow the IT department to deploy new applications quickly and easily.
By choosing a cloud delivery platform from a reputable service provider, you can take advantage of web performance technologies like route optimization. The cloud enables optimal connections between user and application through the solution’s distributed server network.
5. Define Key Capabilities to Validate
A cloud perimeter enables IT and security teams to focus on what’s important, rather than battle complex systems daily.
While creating your perimeter, you must outline the essential competencies you require to show the migration’s progress.
Want to know more about the cloud perimeter journey? Click on the link below to watch a quick video and to download the whitepaper 5 Steps to Begin Your Cloud Perimeter Journey.
