What is Cloud Infrastructure Security?

Cloud infrastructure security is the practice of securing the virtual and physical infrastructure of cloud resources from external and internal threats by using tools, technologies, and policies.

Cloud infrastructure security helps you protect your cloud environments and data from cyber threats, such as data breaches, DDoS attacks, and insider threats. These threats are growing as more modern businesses rely on cloud services.

According to a report by McKinsey & Company, cloud adoption is likely to generate US$3 trillion by 2030 for US Fortune 500 companies.

Wondering why? When you move your IT infrastructure to the cloud, you can use your cloud resources anywhere you want, create and deploy software easily, cut down costs, and scale your resources without hassles. However, vulnerabilities in cloud systems lure attackers, which is why you must secure your cloud infrastructure.

In this article, you will learn about cloud infrastructure security, its importance, benefits, challenges, and best practices for protecting your cloud resources.

What Is Cloud Infrastructure Security?

Cloud infrastructure security means securing the physical and virtual infrastructure of cloud-based resources against cyber threats. It uses various technologies, tools, and policies to protect cloud applications, databases, and environments.

Cloud infrastructure includes all the components required for cloud computing, such as storage systems, computing power, hardware, virtual resources, networking, etc. You need all these components to host your applications and services in the cloud.

Physical components are servers, network systems, and other cloud data center elements. Virtual components mimic physical infrastructure components, such as servers, network switches, memory, and storage space. There are three types of cloud infrastructure models – public, private, or hybrid.

In cloud infrastructure security, you need to use both virtual and physical controls, such as secure data centers, encryption, authentication, threat detection and response. These controls detect and eliminate vulnerabilities as soon as they appear. This helps you prevent an attack or reduce its impacts. In addition, this security strategy helps you manage access controls to block unauthorized users from accessing your cloud resources. It also aids in disaster recovery and maintains compliance across various cloud environments to promote business continuity.

Please don’t confuse cloud infrastructure security with cloud security. The latter deals with protecting the complete cloud environment, including the network, data, endpoints, and applications. On the other hand, cloud infrastructure security defends the resources and systems supporting the cloud.

Why Is Cloud Infrastructure Security Important?

The cloud is not risk-proof; similar to on-premise IT infrastructure, it also has vulnerabilities that attract cyber attackers. Here are some of the reasons:

• A large attack surface created with multiple applications, systems, and endpoints can have security loopholes
• Lack of access controls, especially in public cloud environments, opens the door to attacks
• Sensitive data stored in the cloud that hackers look for
• Multi-cloud deployments, increasing complexity

Even a minor vulnerability in your cloud infrastructure could transform into a big cyberattack that can compromise your data, systems, and networks. As a result, you could lose your sensitive data to attackers, invest significantly in recovering from attacks, and lose your trusted customers and business partners. This is why securing your cloud infrastructure is important as the days pass by.

With cloud infrastructure security, your organization stays safe from internal and external threats. This improves your business continuity, shows compliance with regulations, reduces risks, cuts down unnecessary costs, and maintains your reputation in the industry.

Key Components of Cloud Infrastructure Security

Cloud infrastructure security has many components that form the basis of a cloud security strategy. It’s important to understand each one of them to be able to protect them, and in turn, protect your cloud infrastructure. Some of the main components include:

1. Accounts

When you create a new cloud service or scale an existing one in the cloud, this may automatically create a user or service account. These accounts come with default security settings, which could be weak.

Now, what’s concerning is user accounts in the cloud may have certain privileges and access to important data and infrastructure. Cyber attackers can compromise these accounts if you don’t set up strong security controls. They can steal data, encrypt data and demand ransomware, move laterally to other systems, and bring an organization’s security down to its knees.

2. Networking

Cloud systems and related supplementary services communicate with each other via public networks or virtual networks. If you don’t secure your connections enough, attackers can intercept your communications to steal your data and infiltrate your network with malware. For secure networking, you can definitely check out and use cloud networking technologies, such as virtual private networks (VPNs), load balancers, and Content delivery networks (CDNs).

3. Servers

Cloud servers are virtual servers that run in a cloud computing environment and allow users to access its resources via a network from anywhere. Different cloud deployment models, including Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) use cloud servers.

Being on-demand, they are cost-efficient and are highly available and scalable. But they also come with security risks due to the sensitive data they carry and from third-party providers.

4. Databases

A cloud database can contain sensitive information and is linked to cloud systems and applications. Insecure databases in the cloud can act as an entry point for cyber attackers that may infiltrate your cloud infrastructure. This is why you must secure your databases in the cloud with strong measures, such as zero trust and IAM.

5. Storage

In cloud infrastructure, there is a concept of virtualization. This technology creates a virtual version of a physical system, such as storage and operating systems. This way, you can create multiple virtual machines (VMs) in a single physical computer.

With storage virtualization, you can provision or de-provision storage space where you need it. However, virtual storage systems are vulnerable to security risks if you don’t use strong security measures.

6. Hypervisors

A hypervisor, virtualizer, or virtual machine monitor is software important in virtualization technology. It creates and runs multiple VMs on a single host or physical computer, allocating each VM an operating system, applications, and computing resources (CPU, memory, storage, etc.).

However, if an attacker manages to compromise your hypervisor, they can access all the VMs, the host, applications, and data that run on it. If you use a private cloud, deploy a hypervisor with strong security controls and update and patch your host machines.

7. Kubernetes

Kubernetes or “k8” is an open-source platform that manages containerized applications, services, and workloads. It can automatically create a new container, remove one, scale an application’s resource usage, and so on. It helps avoid downtime in the production environment by deploying a new container if an existing one fails.

Security risks with Kubernetes occur due to infected container images, misconfigurations in cloud clusters, vulnerabilities in APIs, and more. Because of the layered structure (code, container, clusters, and network environment), you can’t separate a k8 cluster from other layers in the cloud. An attack on one layer will quickly propagate to other layers. To secure it from threats, use safe coding practices to prevent malware, scan container images for vulnerabilities, correct cluster configurations, and safeguard your master nodes.

Common Threats to Cloud Infrastructure Security

Your cloud infrastructure is not immune to cyber threats. Although cloud computing benefits you in many ways, there are many cyber threats looming over your cloud infrastructure and trying to harm your organization.

Some of the common cloud infrastructure security threats include:

• Data Breaches: Insecure cloud infrastructure or leaving your sensitive data exposed in the public cloud is a lucrative opportunity for attackers. If you don’t set up strong access controls, they can gain unauthorized access to your data, use them for illegal purposes, and disturb your operations.

However, recovering from data breaches takes significant time and resources. According to an IBM report, the global average cost of a data breach (2024) is a staggering $4.88 million.

• API Exploits: Attackers constantly search for vulnerabilities and exploit them for their personal gains and to devastate an organization or individual. If your cloud infrastructure has vulnerable APIs, they also invite attackers. Similarly, weak security controls in your APIs and the data they carry are more reasons for cyber attacks to occur.
• DOS and DDoS attacks: Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) aim to overwhelm your cloud systems by flooding them with too many requests. This makes your cloud systems unresponsive or unavailable for real users. As a result, your organization may face downtimes or business disruptions for longer periods. You won’t be able to serve your customers or address their concerns in time, which will affect their experience. You may lose revenue, customers, and business partners because of it.

• Malicious Insiders: A malicious insider in your organization could be an unhappy employee who wants to take revenge for something, someone who wants to steal your sensitive data for personal gains, or a spy in disguise who works for others. No matter what the intent of a malicious insider is, they slowly corrupt your organization. They may steal your confidential data and sell it to your competitors or expose it to the public. They may also manipulate your systems to cause errors and operational delays or install malware and invite attackers to compromise your systems. Detecting them is difficult because they already have permission to access your assets.

• Unintentional/Accidental Security Mistakes: Insider threats could have non-malicious motives. Poor security practices and carelessness could create a security loophole through which attackers can crawl into your systems. For example, an employee may accidentally download malware in their systems by clicking a suspicious link, use weak passwords that are easy to guess, or your team could be using insecure third-party tools that connect to your cloud infrastructure.

• Account Compromises: Poor security practices, credential stuffing, brute-force attacks, etc. are ways attackers may compromise your cloud accounts. And when they do, they can easily access your sensitive data. They can exploit the vulnerabilities in a third-party system that has access to your cloud environment to access your files or trick employees into revealing confidential data. They can also hack email accounts to cause more harm.

• Shadow IT: Your employees may knowingly or unknowingly use cloud services and applications without the knowledge of the cybersecurity team. These cloud systems could have vulnerabilities that attackers may exploit to attack your cloud infrastructure. This puts the security of all your cloud resources at risk. What’s worse? As your cybersecurity team has not approved or authorized these cloud systems, they don’t have security measures ready to secure them. It takes time to get to the root cause and remediate the issues while the attacker continues harming your cloud infrastructure.

• Social Engineering Threats: Social engineering attacks, such as phishing, trick employees into disclosing confidential data or passwords by appearing as a trustworthy source. If the employees follow instructions like clicking on a link, downloading a file, or sharing OTPs or passwords, the attacker will compromise their accounts. This way, the attacker can access your cloud infrastructure, steal data, and cause harm of many sorts.

Cloud Infrastructure Security for Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Environments

Many companies opt for multi-cloud and hybrid environments to support their distributed workforce or run their operations in multiple regions.

Here’s how you can protect your hybrid and multi-cloud environments:

Securing Public Cloud Infrastructure

Mostly it’s your cloud provider’s responsibility to secure your infrastructure in a public cloud. They also equip you with tools to secure your workloads, configurations, etc.

• Use data encryption to safeguard your sensitive data at rest and in transit
• Set up strict access controls by using IAM policies, zero trust access, multi-factor authentication, role-based access controls, and secure VPNs
• Review and adjust compliance requirements like GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, etc., especially if you belong to a highly regulated industry, such as healthcare and finance
• Review the security of third-party tools and replace less secure ones

Securing Private Cloud Infrastructure

Private clouds are more secure as they are not publicly exposed. An organization deploys a private cloud in its data centers, which means securing the cloud and its infrastructure is the organization’s responsibility. Here’s how to achieve this:

• Invest in the physical security of the data center facility, such as surveillance, access permissions, and guarding the premises
• Isolate and segment your networks to prevent malicious traffic, data breaches, and other threats looking to compromise your critical applications
• Harden access controls for critical cloud resources and privileged accounts using IAM, least privileged access, and zero trust to prevent insider threats
• Isolate VMs, host OS, and cloud containers to stop attackers from moving laterally if they compromise one component
• Monitor your private cloud continuously to visualize and control the infrastructure and spot suspicious behavior
• Audit and assess your private cloud infrastructure to detect and eliminate vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and bugs

Securing Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

A hybrid cloud combines public clouds, private clouds, and on-premise data centers. So, it’s the responsibility of both the cloud provider and the customer to secure the hybrid infrastructure. Consider the below to do your part:

• Use both traditional and advanced security practices to safeguard your physical data centers as well as clouds
• Encrypt connections between public and private cloud components to keep away attackers
• Keep your security policies consistent across all environments, such as encryption standards, protocols, etc.
• Stay compliant with laws and regulations applicable in the region where you operate or your data resides

Benefits of Cloud Infrastructure Security

Securing your cloud infrastructure has got many perks. You get to protect your data, avoid non-compliance risks, and improve your organization’s security posture.

Not to mention, cloud infrastructure security saves you from costly fixes after a disastrous cyber attack. Let’s find out the benefits of cloud infrastructure security:

• Data protection: Using data encryption, access controls, and other security mechanisms in your cloud infrastructure, you can protect your sensitive data from unauthorized access, exposure, insider threats, and other attacks.
• Compliance: By securing your customer and business data in the cloud using adequate controls, you are showing your adherence to data compliance authorities and standards, such as HIPAA, GDPR, etc.
• Cost savings: On average, organizations can save $2.22 million if they use security automation and AI to prevent cyber threats compared to those that do not. So, cloud security helps you save significant money in costly fixes and recovering from attacks.
• Stronger cloud security posture: Using cloud security measures and solutions, such as MFA, IAM, etc. lets you strengthen your organization’s cloud security posture and make it resilient to attacks. You can easily detect, prioritise, and respond to attacks and lower the impact.
• Scalability: Knowing your cloud infrastructure is solid, you will get the confidence to scale your organization swiftly without worrying about security. You will be able to make the most of your cloud deployments by scaling them based on your requirements and growing your business.

Cloud Infrastructure Security Challenges

Making use of infrastructure security in cloud computing offers many benefits to organizations of all scales across industries, but there are certain challenges and issues that you may come across:

• Inadequate security controls: Poor security measures in your cloud infrastructure, such as weak encryptions, excessive permissions, no authentication mechanisms, etc. enable attackers to penetrate your systems and steal data.

• Vulnerable third-party systems: Your cloud infrastructure may have components from third-party providers. Since you have no control over their security, you won’t know even if vulnerabilities exist in those systems. To make matters worse, these vulnerabilities could transform into a cyber threat if an attacker gets to them first before remediation.

• Misconfigurations: Incorrect cloud configurations make attackers’ job easier to compromise and exploit the security posture. As a result, data breaches, exposure, manipulations, and other damages can occur, underscoring IaC security.
• Poor visibility: Organizations often lack visibility into their cloud infrastructure as the service provider controls it entirely. This means the organization using the cloud finds it difficult to identify and secure their cloud resources and data or track user activity. So, detecting insider threats and data breaches becomes challenging.
• Complex environments: Securing hybrid and multi-cloud environments is tough as there are a lot of components in play, both on-premise and in the cloud. So, managing security controls and compliance standards across different environments is difficult.

Best Practices for Securing Cloud Infrastructure

It’s never enough no matter how strong your cybersecurity measures are. This is why you should apply as many security measures and best practices as possible to stay protected from threats.

Consider the below best practices to secure your cloud infrastructure from threats:

• Invest in Cloud Network Security: To protect your cloud network, you can use VPNs, CDNs, and load balancers.
  • A VPN is an isolated environment in the cloud that offers better privacy for your connections and helps prevent vulnerabilities if you configure the settings correctly.
  • A CDN is a cloud-based server that distributes content to various locations. It caches content near the end users, so they can access cloud resources faster with security while reducing the cost.
  • Use load balancers that distribute or “balance” network traffic among multiple servers for better efficiency and protection from DDoS attacks, data breaches, and other threats.
• Protect Your Cloud Accounts: To protect your user accounts in the cloud, use strong access mechanisms, such as identity and access management (IAM), zero trust, and CIEM security.
  • Set policies so that only the right individuals with the right level of permissions can access your cloud resources
  • Ask users to verify their identity before granting access permissions
  • Use monitoring and threat detection tools can also help you protect your cloud accounts
• Use Database Security Measures: Control access permissions to the cloud database by enforcing zero trust policies, role-based access controls (RBAC), and the least privileged access.
  • Avoid exposing your databases to public networks and block connections from unnecessary applications.
  • Align your database’s security settings with your industry’s compliance requirements.
  • Restrict unknown devices from connecting to your network and accessing your database, allow only secure ones.
• Optimize and Control Cloud Storage: To secure your virtual storage systems, categorize your data based on how sensitive they are and implement access controls accordingly using an automated tool. Maintain the list of all the applications, users, and systems that use cloud storage and remove those unnecessary to optimize storage.
• Look out for data accesses, transfers, and modifications that seem to be suspicious or unauthorized. A cloud-based data loss prevention (DLP) tool can help you do it.
• Control who has access to what data and at what level
• Delete data that you no longer need or is outdated, irrelevant, or faulty. It will help you free up some space, reduce cloud costs, and reduce security and compliance risks.
• Secure Your Cloud Servers: If you use cloud servers, you must protect them from threats so that they don’t get to your cloud resources stored on those servers.
  • Encrypt your communications to prevent interceptions and man-in-the-middle attacks
  • Refrain from using unsecured protocols, such as FTP or Telnet. Use HTTPS or SFTP instead.
  • Ensure your cloud server only connects with secure IPs and networks and those it operates
  • Control account permissions so they only access data they require for their job role
  • Use SSH keys for safe access to cloud servers instead of passwords that attackers can crack
• Manage Compliance: Data protection laws and regulatory bodies, such as HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI DSS require organizations to follow their requirements. Non-compliance could cost you heavy penalties and fines. This is why you must always track and manage compliance requirements in the region where your business operates.
• Track changes in requirements to stay compliant
• Monitor and review your security and data protection measures periodically and adjust them
• Use compliance management tools to automate the process of tracking and managing requirements
• Train Your Employees: Invest in employee training organization-wide so they understand the importance of securing the cloud.
• • Make them aware of the latest cybersecurity trends and threats and how to stay safe from them
  • Teach them security best practices to avoid phishing attacks, data breaches, and theft
  • Equip your security team with advanced cloud security tools and guidance on using them

Real-World Examples of Cloud Infrastructure Security Breaches

• Kaseya: In the year 2021, a ransomware attack targeted MSPs using Kaseya’s virtual system administrator (VSA). This massive cyber attack was launched by a ransomware group named REvil. It exploited many vulnerabilities, such as a zero-day vulnerability, in the system. The attackers encrypted the data of over 1,000 companies and demanded $70 million in ransom. The company warned the MSPs to stop using the tool until further notice and provided them with a VSA detection solution to find and fix vulnerabilities.

• Cognyte: A researcher found that a series of security incidents on an unsecured database exposed about 5 billion records online. According to reports, Cognyte, a cybersecurity analytics company, operated the database. The company mistakenly left its cloud database unprotected which led to attacks and made the data accessible without any authentication. The data included email addresses, passwords, names, etc. All thanks to the researcher who alerted Cognyte, the company could address the threat and secure the data.

• Capital One: The American Bank, Capital One, faced a data breach in 2019. The attacker gained unauthorized access to confidential data of the Bank’s credit card customers as well as individuals who applied for their credit card services. The attack exposed around 100 million records in the US and 6 million records in Canada. It happened due to vulnerabilities in Capital One’s cloud infrastructure that attackers exploited to gain entry. The bank reportedly began fixing the issue and working with regulators.

Cloud Infrastructure Security with SentinelOne

SentinelOne is a leading cloud security solution provider that helps you protect your cloud infrastructure and resources. It offers Singularity Cloud Security, a comprehensive CNAPP platform that can protect your entire cloud infrastructure in real-time against cybersecurity threats.

Here are some of the noteworthy features that the platform offers:

• Identifies unknown cloud deployments and compliance issues
• Finds and eliminates cloud misconfigurations
• Responds quickly to threats
• Scans CI/CD pipelines and repositories for vulnerabilities
• Provides AI-powered threat intelligence and protection
• Performs secret scanning and provides full forensic telemetry
• Offers low code/no code hyper automation to speed up remediation

Conclusion

Cloud infrastructure security is a great way to protect your cloud resources and environments from data breaches, insider threats, and other cyberattacks. This is why you must use strong security controls, such as IAM, zero trust, authentication mechanisms, and encryption to protect your cloud resources.

If you are looking for a comprehensive, all-in-one tool to secure your cloud infrastructure from threats, SentinelOne’s Singularity Cloud Security is a great option. It comes with advanced capabilities to identify security vulnerabilities and threats, respond to them with AI-powered threat intelligence, and save you time with hyper automation. Request a free demo to get started.

FAQs

What does Cloud Infrastructure Security mean?

Cloud infrastructure security is the process of protecting cloud-based systems, data, and applications from cyber threats. It includes firewalls, encryption, access controls, and monitoring activities to avoid unauthorized access and data breaches. In other words, proper security ensures that your cloud resources are accurate, confidential, and accessible.

How does compliance impact Cloud Infrastructure Security?

Compliance by organizations involves adherence to set standards of security and regulations. This ensures that the cloud infrastructure meets the required standard of protection of data and privacy. Compliance influences security in terms of practices such as encryption, access controls, and regular auditing that are essential in preventing data breaches to maintain trust.

What are the industries that most need Cloud Infrastructure Security Solutions?

Cloud infrastructure security solutions find their key applications in industries like healthcare, finance, government, and retail. These industries deal with a lot of sensitive data and are hence subject to strict regulatory requirements. Stronger security helps protect confidential information, ensures compliance, and prevents costly breaches.

Can small businesses use security tools for protecting their Cloud Infrastructure?

Small businesses can also benefit extensively from various kinds of tools used in cloud infrastructure security. These definitely protect against cyber threats without requiring much expertise in-house. Securing cloud environments, maintaining customer trust, and ensuring business continuity in small businesses are possible at a low cost with scalability through the use of cloud environments.

What are the indications of a Cloud Infrastructure Security Breach?

Signs of a cloud infrastructure security breach include unusual login activities, unexpected data transfers, sudden system performance issues, unauthorized changes to configurations, and alerts from security monitoring tools. Detecting these indicators early helps mitigate damage and secure compromised resources effectively.

How to Choose the Right Cloud Security Tools?

Identify needs regarding data protection, compliance, or the detection of threats; then pick cloud security tools accordingly, considering features such as encryption, access control, and real-time monitoring. Consider scalability, ease of integration, vendor reputation, and support in selecting appropriate tools for your needs.

What is IaC Security, and how does it affect Cloud Environments?

IaC security refers to securing Infrastructure as Code, which automates the provisioning of cloud resources. It ensures that code-based configurations are free from vulnerabilities and comply with security policies. Proper IaC security prevents misconfigurations, unauthorized access, and potential exploits, maintaining the integrity of cloud environments.

What are the main Differences Between CIEM and Traditional IAM?

CIEM is a security discipline dealing exclusively with managing and securing cloud-specific permissions and identities. IAM has traditionally handled user identities and access across both on-premises and cloud environments. With CIEM, one gets a granular view of cloud entitlements with better control in dynamic cloud environments for improved security.

What best practices exist to secure the Infrastructure in the Cloud?

It includes best practices such as access control, encryption of data in rest and transit, periodic updating and patching, activity monitoring and logging, principle of least privilege, periodic security assessments, and compliance with relevant regulations that form the necessary elements of a cloud environment protection strategy.