Cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) take responsibility for securing their cloud infrastructure. They also give you tools and support to help you secure the data you put into the cloud. But is that enough to safeguard your organization’s most sensitive data? Whether you are pondering a move to the cloud, already in the cloud, or expanding to multiple cloud platforms, it’s time to get a true assessment of your risk and learn how to manage sensitive data in the cloud with confidence.
Download this free ebook to learn more about:
- Pros and cons of the cloud
- Shared security responsibility and protecting the unknown
- Sensitive data discovery and protection
Who Is Actually Responsible for Data in AWS?
AWS operates a shared security responsibility model. AWS secures the underlying cloud infrastructure. The customer secures the workloads and data placed into it, and remains responsible for complying with whatever privacy regulation applies to that data.
The infrastructure is among the most secure available. That is a statement about the platform, not about the data an organization puts on it, and the distinction is where most cloud compliance failures live.
Why Cloud Adoption Outruns Governance
The same speed that makes cloud services attractive routes around the process that would have reviewed them. A team can start a project with a credit card and no involvement from IT, which is exactly why shadow IT persists: it helps people do their jobs.
The workloads moved that way frequently contain sensitive data. The people moving them are often unaware of that, and unaware that law or policy requires them to protect it.
The Cloud Is Not the Problem
Managing security and compliance is already difficult on premises. Organizations run substantial tooling and still suffer breaches and failed audits. Moving to the cloud does not create that problem, but it does multiply the number of places the problem can occur, and it removes the comfort of owning the hardware.
Concern about cloud data security is consistently the top reason organizations hold back, particularly where privacy law varies by region and keeps changing.
Start by Finding What You Already Moved
An assessment of cloud risk begins with an inventory rather than a policy. What sensitive data is already in cloud storage, which teams put it there, what regulation covers it, and what protection is applied to it today.
Automated discovery is what makes that answerable at cloud scale and keeps it answerable, since the estate changes weekly rather than annually.
Protect the Data, Not Just the Environment
Once sensitive data is located, protection should be applied to the data itself, chosen by data type and by who needs to use it. Encryption where the content must stay intact for authorized users, masking where a copy is needed for testing or analysis, redaction where only part of a record should be visible.
Protection applied that way survives the next migration, the next region and the next provider, because it does not depend on the environment holding the file.
The Questions to Ask Before the Next Migration
Four questions establish whether a cloud environment is genuinely under control. Which regulated data is in it. Which teams can reach that data, and under what authorization. What protection is applied to it, at rest and in transit. And what evidence exists that those answers are current rather than remembered from the last audit.
Organizations that can answer all four expand their cloud usage with confidence, because each new workload is assessed against a known position rather than an assumed one. Those that cannot tend to slow adoption instead, which costs them the agility that made the cloud attractive without making the data any safer.