IEFRA2 — IEF Alignment with Cloud Security Practices

"19.4 Suggestion
1.10.3 IEF Alignment with Cloud Security Practices
Cloud security practices have evolved to address the increasing adoption of cloud-based infrastructures, applications, and services. A core challenge in cloud environments is maintaining control over access to enterprise resources—such as systems, applications, devices, and
data—while ensuring security and compliance. Traditional perimeter-based security models are ineffective in cloud environments, where workloads, applications, and data reside across multiple infrastructures and geographies.
Zero-trust computing aligns with cloud security by shifting security enforcement from the network perimeter to the data and resource level. Instead of assuming trust within a defined network boundary, zero-trust principles enforce continuous verification and least-privilege access across cloud environments. The IEF-RA supports this paradigm by treating data as a protected resource, independent of the applications, systems, and infrastructures that process it.
Organizations leveraging cloud services face challenges such as:
● Lack of Visibility – Workloads and data are dispersed across multiple cloud providers and infrastructures, reducing insight into where data resides and who accesses it.
● Shared Responsibility Model – Cloud service providers control physical, network, and infrastructure security, leaving organizations responsible for securing data, applications, and user access
Access Control Complexities – Traditional identity and access management models struggle to enforce granular, data-centric security across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
The IEF-RA provides a framework for mitigating these challenges through:
● Separation of Data from Users and Applications – The IEF-RA enforces security policies at the data access layer, ensuring protection regardless of cloud infrastructure.
● Defense-in-Depth for Cloud Data Security – By integrating access control, encryption, and logging, IEF-RA prevents unauthorized access, enhances monitoring, and enforces security policies dynamically.
● Policy-Driven Access Management – IEF-RA ensures that access to cloud data is governed by predefined policies, aligned with enterprise security requirements and compliance mandates.
As illustrated in Figure 1.10-1, IEF-RA implements cloud security practices by:
● Enforcing zero-trust access control through Policy Enforcement Points (PEPs).
● Securing structured and unstructured data using encryption and policy-driven access rules.
● Integrating with federated identity and access management (ICAM) solutions to enhance authentication and authorization across cloud services.
● Providing auditing and logging capabilities to maintain visibility and track data access across cloud environments.
By applying these principles, IEF-RA ensures that organizations can adopt cloud security best practices while maintaining fine-grained control over data access, sharing, and protection in cloud environments.
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