A data breach could cause your significant business losses. Are you aware that 84% of surveyed companies revealed they experienced over 2 data breaches in the last year?
It’s time to act and secure your cloud data. Are you ready to learn how?
Keep reading as we discuss how VPNs can help secure cloud data and control access to your digital assets and resources.
A VPN is a virtual private network. When you host your data in the cloud, you can protect it using cybersecurity tools and software. However, when your employees use the internet to communicate on behalf of your business, they cannot conceal your business’s digital identity or IP address.
Your IP address is used to identify a device. A cybercriminal could access your company’s address using your IP address. They could also access critical cloud-based information using this IP address.
To mitigate this risk, you can implement a VPN that conceals your IP address. A VPN protects your online identity by rerouting your internet access through an external server. This way, only the external server’s IP address will be available to other internet users, and you can keep your cloud-based information and company address secure.
To understand why a VPN might be helpful for your business, you need to understand what happens when you fall victim to a data breach. Below are some of the main issues your business will encounter following a data breach:
Here are some main ways VPNs help secure cloud-based data and control access.
When your employees engage in online activity using applications and websites, your VPN will provide a secure connection. Your company data will remain private, and external access will be restricted. This feature could be invaluable if your employees are accessing an unsecured internet infrastructure from a company device.
Contractors, employees, visitors, and interviewees will likely need to use your network inside your building. However, this doesn’t mean they should be able to access all of the company data on your network. So, you need to establish role-based access control permissions for your company data.
A VPN can help you to establish varied access control permissions based on roles using IP addresses and usernames to identify individuals. You can specify which devices can access all company information and work from there. When used in conjunction with biometric access control systems, your VPN adds another layer of protection to ensure that building visitors and low-level employees can never access your vital sensitive data.
To establish role-based permissions in access control security, a VPN uses an LDAP, or lightweight directory access protocol. This is like an address book for your employees’ device IP addresses, username details, and access authorizations.
Using a third-party cloud environment will not need a VPN, as the third party will encrypt and protect your data and handle all authorization controls. However, if you are using a private cloud, you must protect your cloud-based data as it travels from one source to another (or from your public cloud to a secure employee device).
To help you do this, a VPN encrypts your data. This way, data traveling from your peer network to your virtual cloud network will be completely secure. It is encrypted at one end of its journey and decrypted at the other.
Protecting your company data is of the utmost importance. If you want to improve your cloud security, weigh the benefits of a VPN. VPNs can offer you access restrictions for a zero-trust network access policy and protect your cloud-based resources as they travel between cloud-based locations.
