How to Evaluate Cloud Service Provider Security

Check adherence to standards and frameworks

Ensure your selected provider meets standards like ISO 27001, ISO-27002, and ISO-27017, to ensure that the provider follows the security best practices and actively manages risks. While ISO-27018 is also important to ensure the protection of personally identifiable information.

Additionally, considering regulatory practices like GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and PCI DSS can act as a bonus for your organization to ensure maximum data protection.

Audit operational and business processes

Cloud providers often provide documentation explaining their compliance with relevant guidelines and regulations; however, it is always crucial to request additional details for smooth processing. Look for third-party security assessments from independent auditors and ensure that the providers offer prompt access to security events and log data as per the SLA.

In any scenario, if the provider shows hesitation or maybe is unable to provide such information, it may lead to potential risks about the commitment to the security.

Verify authentication and identity controls

The shift to cloud-based data and applications may lead to new risks as they can be accessed easily from anywhere globally, increasing the risks of theft and misuse. Therefore, it is crucial to choose a cloud provider that implements robust security against authentication and identity controls.

Verify the features, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) for logins and tools for real-time identity monitoring, to secure all the identities within the environment.

Understand vendor governance and access policies

When migrating to the cloud, the first and foremost step is to have a strong trust relationship with your cloud provider, as your data and workloads will pass through their infrastructure. Having clear and defined vendor governance and access policies is crucial to protect your business.

These policies should mention the provider’s control over your data and their capabilities and rights, ensuring transparency and security to the risks linked to data privacy.

Ensure access to corporate audit trails

Audit trails are the crucial records used to document the date, time, and details of cloud transactions, detailing who performed the specific actions. To maintain transparency and accountability, your cloud provider must offer direct access to these audit trails.

With a lack of access, tracking and reconstructing records can become challenging, making it difficult to maintain comprehensive oversight.

Evaluate internal management resources

Migrating to the public cloud requires continuous attention. It is an important aspect to understand the resources you’re utilising and your responsibilities in protecting your cloud environment.

Remember, cloud operators often operate under shared responsibility models, where they provide frameworks for securing and monitoring workloads, including the factors like governance controls, and compliance reporting.

Thoroughly review cloud SLA SLAs

The cloud SLA serves as the formal agreement between the organization and cloud service provider, outlining service expectations, and key security considerations such as shared responsibilities, reliability, maintenance, governance, and auditing data.

Understanding the importance of a document, it is crucial to thoroughly review and understand its implications. However, the involvement of security leaders and legal teams can help avoid misunderstandings that could lead to serious issues such as data breaches, and privacy violations.

Examine the security service pricing

Cloud service providers prioritize security and thus offer services like AWS security hub, and GCP security command centre, at any additional prices.

The addition of these services to your businesses enables transparency, misconfiguration alerts, and threat intelligence. The best tip is to connect with your security advisors to assess whether these premium services are necessary or if you can manage with your security providers.

Check for data storage locations

Before migrating to the cloud, it is crucial to verify and classify the security and confidentiality requirements of your data. This step will help you evaluate whether the cloud provider’s storage environment meets your business-specific requirements.

The additional advice is to check for the physical locations where your data will be stored, as there are a few providers who may store data in countries with weaker security standards leading to potential risks.

Evaluate third-party integration capabilities

Ensure your platform supports third-party security integrations to access and verify how much control and customization your business can achieve. Businesses often use third-party platforms to build custom cloud security models, thus prefer a security model that offers flexibility and doesn’t restrict you to their preferred services.

Examine uptime and downtime performance

Just like any business, cloud providers can experience outages and downtimes too, which can impact their customers. For example, Apple recently experienced a significant outage that affected multiple applications.

To avoid such disruptions, thoroughly examine uptime and downtime performance metrics, how often outage occurs and how quickly it can be fixed.

Investigate the history of data breaches or loss

To be sure about a cloud provider’s security, it is important to examine the history of data breaches and losses. Consider the factors like provider’s scope, scale, and shared responsibility model.

The only advice here is to understand the reasons for incidents that can help you determine whether they were due to the provider’s shortcomings or customer errors.