For enterprise IT and security teams, the rapidly rising number of cloud services generates a never-ending and exceptionally rapid cycle of change. Many teams are scrambling to secure data on the public cloud, and most businesses are relying on outdated security strategies that don’t work in cloud environments.
Security teams are accustomed to thinking in terms of establishing boundaries with networks, deploying security stacks where those boundaries intersect, and configuring them based on well-known and secure data pathways. In the cloud, this just does not work as a comprehensive security solution. Instead, cloud security teams should consider what identities they have authority over, what those identities can do, and what resources they have access to.
Identity is the first step in the current attack cycle. Attackers try to obtain access to a resource using an identity, then pivot between resources, discovering credentials and additional people and non-people identities that give them further access to sensitive data and lead to data breaches. Identity security extends beyond the traditional walls of the company, which is why businesses are witnessing data breaches as a result of failing to apply old network security strategies to the cloud.
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When evaluating their cloud security positions, security teams should ask themselves the following questions:
Are companies treating their identities as their perimeter?
Businesses are putting their firm in danger if the team is still operating an obsolete network perimeter. Person and non-person identities should be managed by the organization.
Have organizations discovered their cloud security risks?
The risk of cloud security deterioration and drift might occur swiftly. Misconfigurations of identity, resources, and services can result in serious data breaches. Identifying unauthorized identities and excessive privileges is the first step in mitigating risk. To maximize control management, security, and governance of data, data owners and cloud operations, security, and audit teams should constantly assess risk.
Is it true that data exposures are insufficient indicators?
In risk assessment methodologies, transparent cloud data storage is insufficient. While data owners may have confidence in their DevOps to manage data object storage, this does not reflect the total extent of external party access and privileges. Users of the cloud should be fully aware of where their data is stored, who has access to it, how it is accessed, and where it is traveling to and from.
What are the challenges with coordination?
The old model of sending security alerts to a single team for triage and management is no longer viable. Diverse organizations, including Audit, DevOps, and Security teams, employ the cloud operating paradigm at the same time. The outmoded paradigm crumbles at this point. The solution is to get the concerns to the team(s) that produced them, as they are the best people to deal with them.
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Have companies addressed the skills gap among their cloud security employees?
Many developers are not security specialists by nature and should be educated on recommended practices. Organizations that don’t want to burden their existing development employees with added responsibilities can require a new sort of operations person who combines operations and security (DevSecOps). Failure to up skill employees means they lack the skills and knowledge required to protect today’s business.
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