Cloud security strategies that actually work for businesses

Here’s a harsh truth that most businesses need to hear: your cloud infrastructure almost certainly has some security gaps. This isn’t because you lack expertise or because all of your security tools are inadequate. Instead, it’s more likely down to the fact that securing complex cloud environments requires balancing security, functionality and business priorities. This is a serious challenge that grows more difficult as your cloud footprint expands.

With this in mind, let’s take a look at some cloud security approaches that genuinely work in the real world. One where budgets have constraints, teams have limited resources and perfect security remains an aspiration rather than a realistic goal.

Start with identity, not perimeters

The “castle and moat” security model has quickly become obsolete. You know this, and your development teams recognize this. Yet despite this widely known fact, many organizations continue to invest resources in defending network boundaries while overlooking more pressing matters, one of which is identity management. 

With remote working busting open security perimeters and employees accessing your network from potentially all four corners of the globe, identity must now serve as your perimeter.

Implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) across all systems. No exceptions. This includes your executive team and senior leadership. While it may feel like a minor inconvenience, this is virtually insignificant compared to explaining a compromised administrator account because someone didn’t want to complete an additional authentication step.

Another idea is to implement conditional access policies that restrict connections based on location, device health and risk indicators. Modern identity providers make this relatively straightforward to configure, and it significantly reduces the potential attack surface.

Active protection for web applications

Your public-facing applications are one of the main targets for attacks. They’re essentially sitting ducks for bots, amateur hackers and sophisticated attackers, which is why they hammer away at them looking for vulnerabilities. This is where a web application firewall (WAF) proves its worth.

These days, a high-quality WAF does a lot more than block basic attacks. They offer smart protection against sophisticated threats, including injection attacks, cross-site scripting and application-layer DDoS attempts. When properly tuned, a WAF significantly reduces your risk without slowing down legitimate users and hampering productivity. 

The important part is to remember to set up your WAF so that it understands your specific applications rather than relying on generic rule sets. This targeted approach cuts down false alarms while still catching real threats, allowing your security team to focus on what matters instead of chasing ghosts.

For maximum protection (and ease of use), connect your WAF with other security systems to improve detection accuracy. This integration helps your security setup recognize complex attack patterns that might not be obvious when looking at separate events.

Embrace least privilege

A lot of companies talk about the principle of least privilege (PoLP), but few actually practice it. Take a step back and actually assess what systems and data your teams have access to. If you haven’t been thinking with PoLP in mind, there’s a good chance technical teams have way more permissions than they need because “it makes things easier.”

To reduce your attack surface, you need to reduce and limit unnecessary access. Start by auditing all the permissions across your cloud environments. You may find accounts with a high level of access that haven’t been used in months and service accounts with broad access that could be significantly limited.

The best practice is to eliminate standing permissions and implement just-in-time access for administrative tasks. This further reduces the attack surface and creates accountability through access request logs.

Remember, it’s always a good idea to default to “no.” Grant specific permissions for specific needs, not broad access “just in case.”

Data protection that works with your team

Encryption is massively important, but the reality is that it will quickly become useless if it is implemented in ways that drive your team to create workarounds. At the end of the day, many people operate with the mindset that business comes first. People need and want to get their jobs done, and they want to do them quickly. Whether it’s right or wrong, security is often an afterthought. 

Your job is to make security invisible enough that it doesn’t become the enemy of productivity. To do this, you could set up automatic encryption for data at rest and in transit across your cloud services. This happens behind the scenes with minimal performance impact, and it won’t get in the way too much. 

For sensitive data, consider field-level encryption that protects specific elements rather than the entire database. This focused approach maintains speed while securing what actually matters.

Data classification isn’t exciting, but it’s essential. You can’t protect what you don’t understand. Use automated discovery tools to find where sensitive information lives in your environment, and then you can apply controls that make sense for each data type.

A good point to keep in mind is that “perfect security” that prevents work from happening isn’t really security at all. That’s probably better classified as just an expensive roadblock that people will find ways around.

Monitor what matters

Alert fatigue is a real problem that burns out your security team. Most monitoring systems and cybersecurity solutions push out so many notifications that important signals get lost in all of the noise. At the end of the day, no matter how sophisticated your systems, humans will come into the process at some point, so try to find ways to focus their detection efforts on high-value assets and critical paths. Not everything needs the same level of attention.

Behavioral analytics tools can spot unusual user or system activities that traditional detection might completely miss. This approach works well for catching insider threats and sophisticated attacks that slip past conventional controls.

Effective cloud security starts by accepting one fundamental, albeit counterintuitive point: that perfect security doesn’t actually exist. Your goal is to minimize and manage risk, not risk elimination. This mindset shift allows you to make better, more informed decisions about where to invest your limited security resources and budget. 

Yes, next-gen tools and complex solutions will always help to boost your protections. However, you also need to make sure you are putting solutions in place that you can consistently execute. In other words, you need to build security processes that actually work with your business, rather than against it. That way, you’ll create protection that actually matters when threats appear.