By 2025, the most important step in the process of securing VPS and cloud hosting will be adopting a zero-trust mindset, plus automated patching and monitoring with AI. Too many businesses are still under the impression that everything is covered by their providers, but the greatest risk is still misconfigured access and poor access controls. Beginners should focus on strong IAM policies and encryption by default, while more advanced admins should focus on continuous compliance and proactive threat detection. The real shift will be not just prevention, but actually building resiliency into every layer of your infrastructure.
We adopt the principle of least privilege which is a very easy policy for beginners to keep in mind and follow: when creating users, only give them the lowest levels of access they need. We also review user roles regularly in case people can have any access removed, and we also remove any user accounts as soon as a person leaves the company. This prevents accidents, or - worst case scenario - limits the pool of who could have caused a problem when investigating an issue. We also avoid any long lived or over permissive keys - again, just keeping things to the absolute essentials required. This is inline with the changes coming into force by March 2029 for SSL certificates to only last 47 days rather than a year. Finally, another easy to adopt security policy that we stick to is to insist on MFA (multi-factor authentication) on all user accounts. Lisa Freeman Director, 18a Productions Ltd https://www.18aproductions.co.uk/