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Cloud-based applications allow all the employees in your organization – from engineers to accountants to salespeople – to work where and how they want. That flexibility forces you to rethink the concept of your IT security perimeter. Security becomes a new challenge that extends far beyond the walls of your physical facilities. Here are five tips you can implement today to secure cloud-based applications.

Take Steps to Reduce Human Error

Phishing attempts, social engineering, and other attacks pose serious security threats to your cloud-based applications. End-user training can help mitigate these threats.

Deploy Multi-Factor Authentication

Compromised passwords are a prime cause of cyberattacks. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) can address that vulnerability. Choosing the right authentication platform is important, because if the login process creates friction for users, it will dampen productivity and, in some cases, they’ll find ways to bypass it. You can get the security of MFA and deliver great user experiences with best-in-class MFA from Entrust. Authenticators can range from passwords and biometrics to digital tokens—which, when used in tandem, are difficult to spoof or steal.

Encrypt Data at Rest and In Motion

The hard truth is that threat actors are likely on your network right now. You at least have to assume they are. This means you need to protect data while it’s at rest, in motion, and in use. Encryption provides the strongest protection for your data. From issuing digital certificates that not only encrypt, but also sign and authenticate, to managing those credentials throughout their lifecycle, require solutions that fit with your IT team structure and management philosophies. Entrust has a broad portfolio of solutions to choose from. Looking for a PKI to secure your business use cases? We've got several options including our PKI as a Service which is simplifies PKI with managed components, and is quick and easy to deploy with pre-built turnkey use cases. Require help gaining visibility and control over all the Certificate Authorities and certificates across your environments? Try the Entrust Certificate Hub to do exactly that, ensuring no certificate or machine identity goes unmanaged. Whatever you need, our PKI experts will guide you through every step of the process.

Choose Solutions Purpose-Built for Multi-Cloud

Entrust CloudControl provides comprehensive security for hybrid multi-cloud environments including centralized authentication, authorization, and audit control. It offers proven integration with all major cloud service providers (CSPs), which makes it ideal for multi-cloud environments. It reduces risk by providing unified security and compliance controls across hybrid multi-clouds, lowering operational overhead, and facilitating workload agility. Also, Entrust DataControl offers complete workload lifecycle encryption management. It includes an enterprise key management server, strong virtual machine (VM) encryption, a live boot operating system, and data partition encryption.

Protect Your Encryption Keys

As stated earlier, encryption is an important part of security for cloud-based applications, but it only provides maximum protection if your keys are properly secured. A crypto key represented in a binary data scan will look very much like “snow” in that it has a varied pattern. All a hacker needs to do is search through data using a relatively unsophisticated program that looks for randomness in a binary data scan. Once the random data is found, it’s highly likely it will be some type of crypto key. Seeing that a company may have a few thousand crypto keys, it doesn’t take long to try these keys against the encrypted data. Entrust HSMs provide a secure solution for generating and storing encryption keys.

Implement an IAM Strategy to Manage User Access and Authorization

Ensure that end-users are granted access to the cloud-based applications that they need to do their jobs—but that they are not granted higher privileges than necessary. One recommended component of a zero-trust framework is to use adaptive authentication to prompt users to enter additional verification credentials if access anomalies are detected.

Ground-Up PKI Information for Your Team

Entrust has been the leader in PKI, certificate management, and HSMs since the inception of the industry. Our solutions have evolved both in terms of security and user experience. They are, without question, the premier offerings in the industry. Along with our solutions, we’ve developed an unmatched wealth of PKI knowledge that we share with our customers and partners. If you are looking for information to help ground your team in PKI basics, you can start by accessing our PKI overview content. Our experts also are always available to provide education and training that aligns with your team’s needs.