Is endpoint security enough to protect the cloud?
Every device that employees use to access business networks poses a potential security risk that cyber criminals can exploit to steal corporate data.These devices a.k.a endpoints are constantly growing with devices ranging from laptops to smartphones and tablets. As the number of devices growing so does the associated vulnerabilities.
In addition to this, the world is evolving and most companies are moving their operations to the Cloud systems. Clouds hold massive amounts of confidential customer data, security is of outmost importance. In cloud ecosystems, cloud service providers and their customers typically share responsibility when it comes to security. For all cloud types, a customer is responsible for protecting the confidential customer data. Therefore, a crucial component of Cloud Security becomes the customer data and business content. Generally companies forget this aspect and assume that customer data and content security is the cloud provider’s responsibility. With this assumption, many organizations provide direct cloud applications access to their customers, suppliers, partners and community users through their firewalls and other network security functions. Companies make mistakes by ignoring that the cloud can eventually be infected by malware if a malicious file or URL link is uploaded. Protection against malware, ransomware and malicious links is often left solely to endpoints. We all know that it can very challenging to identify endpoints, understand access controls and establish secure configurations etc. Despite best efforts and good intentions, endpoints aren’t always up to date and there’s always a risk of malfunction, for instance, the new computer wasn’t fully configured or the manually disabled clients and failed updates. Let’s hope that it does not happen but most often it does, and an endpoint gets infected, and causes a massive malware outbreak. Once malware infects a machine, it uses connectivity and the endpoint’s credential to infect vast numbers of other endpoints on the network.
In the above scenario, Endpoint security alone is essentially ineffective when it comes to combating today’s sophisticated and rapidly evolving threats without additional layers of proactive protection. A multilayered cloud native solution that can monitor and stop the malicious files and URLs related issues and offers advanced protection from cyber threats is the way to go.
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Conclusion: Endpoint protection is a good start but not adequate for the Cloud Security. A multilayered native cloud solution is the best solution to mitigate Cloud Security issues.
