In the age of heightened public cloud adoption and widespread cloud Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) usage, cybercriminals are making use of OAuth – a permissions delegation and authorization protocol – to compromise cloud environments. As such, controlling which applications users interact with has become a business imperative. Let’s take a closer look at what OAuth is, the role it plays in allowing users to access resources across environments, the ways attackers are abusing OAuth and what organizations can do to better protect their cloud data.

It’s within this expanded terrain for cyberattacks that the security trends of 2021 and beyond are taking shape. Workers are engaging with company resources from diverse locations. At the same time, businesses have ramped up their digitalization journeys to be more flexible and agile after COVID-19’s disruption of supply chains. The result is a dynamic tech environment where the continuity of business operations – and ultimately market competitiveness – will rely on robust cyber protections.

While there are several security concerns that cloud users must address in the long run, here are three critical areas that must be given immediate attention, especially now as organizations are planning to scale their remote work setup, and nine best practices organizations must follow to ensure optimal safety of their cloud instances.

Today's complex computing environments are rife with vulnerabilities. Keeping your organizational data safe requires employing today's best data security practice: adopting the premise that identity and access management provide the new and true security perimeter. Powerful identity and access management (IAM) models of public cloud providers enable the deployment of applications and data with far greater protection than what is possible in traditional cloud security. However, these cloud provider IAM solutions are not without risk when misused.