Policy inconsistencies can occur in two ways. In the first type of inconsistency, there is a high-risk service that is allowed, while another, lower risk service is blocked. In this instance, make a policy decision to block both, allow both, or allow only the lower risk service. All three options would eliminate the inconstancy, but you will need to determine which option makes the most sense for your business. The second type of inconsistency occurs when a service is partially blocked.

1. How To Protect Encrypt Data And Avoid Data Loss Prevention On
Cloud
Detect and remediate policy inconsistencies
Policy inconsistencies can occur in two ways. In the first type of inconsistency,
there is a high-risk service that is allowed, while another, lower risk service is blocked.
In this instance, make a policy decision to block both, allow both, or allow only the
lower risk service. All three options would eliminate the inconstancy, but you will
need to determine which option makes the most sense for your business.
The second type of inconsistency occurs when a service is partially blocked.
Sometime there is a legitimate reason for this type of inconsistency (e.g. Marketing
needs access to Facebook but other departments do not. More often than not, this
type of inconsistency occurs because the infrastructure cannot keep up with the
velocity of new cloud services being introduced and used by employees and therefore
many service fall in the unclassified category. Using a cloud service management
product that has an extensive registry of services and automatically visualizes allowed
vs. denied traffic will make identifying both types on inconsistencies simple and will
allow you to easily monitor progress resolving the inconsistencies.
Search for anomalies in user behaviour
When working to reduce the risk of cloud services, much attention is paid to the risk
profile of the cloud services themselves. However, often times perfectly safe and
secure cloud services can be the source of a data leak if an internal employee is acting
maliciously. Unfortunately, no proxy, firewall, or SIEM can alert the organization of
malicious use of a legitimate service. So, the best practice is to leverage a cloud
services management product that has the ability to identify usage anomalies that are
indicative of malicious behaviour.
Conduct investigations into anomalous behaviours
While a cloud service anomaly, such as the Twitter example mentioned above, is a
very good indicator of malicious behaviour, and investigation must be conducted in
order to determine the context and intent of the anomalous behaviour. For example,
the user associated with the IP address that had 1M tweets may have simply
contracted a malware virus that had seized her Twitter account, or she could have

2. been intentionally leaking confidential data. In most cases, the best practices is to
look for a legitimate business use case, compare their activity to benchmarks, and
then contact the line of business manager and corporate security to alert them of the
issue, monitor their activity, and intervene if needed.
Encrypt data going to key services
It is prudent to add another layer of security to the most critical cloud services in your
organization. The first step is to identify services that are enterprise-critical, blessed,
and procured, such as Salesforce, Box, Office365, and Google. Access to those
services should require that employees to use their corporate identity and then access
to your enterprise's account at the service. For example, their traffic would go to
acme.salesforce.com, rather than directly to salesforce.com. This means that you
can then control who has access the account, and what happens to the data sent to this
service.
The best practice is to leverage a reverse proxy to encrypt data sent to these services
with your enterprise managed encryption keys. In doing so, you guarantee that even
if the provider is compromised, your data will not be. Finally, you will need to
ensure that your control is enforced for on-premise to cloud accesses and for mobile
to cloud access. This should be done without requiring the traffic from those devices
to be back-hauled (through a VPN) into your enterprise edge first to avoid introducing
user friction.
Doing this will provide 2 distinct advantages. The first obvious advantage is that
even if the service is compromised, your data will not be because you hold the
encryption keys. The second advantage is that in this era of limited data privacy, this
encryption guards against a blind government subpoena. Microsoft, Google, and
Box, for example, often receive subpoenas from the government asking for
information for a particular company, with a gag order prohibiting them from alerting
that company. By encrypting the data that lives within the cloud, the company can
ensure that it is notified of any investigation, as it will need to provide the encryption
keys to government investigators.
Implement Data Loss Prevention (DLP) guidelines to avoid compliance risk
Any enterprise that utilizes cloud services should be careful about sending
confidential data to the cloud, but if you work in a regulated industry, such as
healthcare or financial services you must be extra vigilant. Within a regulated

3. industry, sending confidential client information to the cloud can result in a serious
compliance violation that would damage the reputation of the company and result in
serious financial penalties. Specifically, healthcare companies must comply with
HIPPA regulations, banks and financial institutions must comply with PCI guidelines
and almost every company must comply with SOX regulations. Complying with
these regulations. Any company using the cloud must have a DLP strategy in order
to comply with these regulations.
Proxies and firewalls cannot protect against the incidental transmission of personal
information, so your cloud data security management product should be able to
provide DLP functionality to help prevent sending confidential client information to
the cloud.
Track progress regularly
Managing the risk of cloud services is not a point in time exercise. You will need to
continually monitor the use of cloud services since new services hit the market daily
and your employees will constantly seek the latest tools to help them do their jobs.
In order to drive a successful and quantifiable risk management program you will
need to determine which metrics to track and develop a methodology for gathering the
data on a regular basis.