Changing technologies and evolving threats make IT security more challenging. Business units are adopting cloud technologies, agile development practices, and application architectures. But cyber criminals are also moving to attack cloud infrastructures, as we’ve seen in our telemetry and in recently reported attacks.

With the right policies and governance implementations, however, cloud-based data and systems can be secured effectively.

Cloud environments are typically built on the shared-responsibility model: The service provider, e.g., Amazon Web Services, is responsible for securing the used infrastructure, while the customer secures parts that are built on top of the cloud. These parts include application components, workloads, or virtual machine instances.

This means that IT staff and developers working on building a secure cloud implementation also have to safeguard their own portion of the system using tools and best practices from their service provider.