As businesses that engage with various security vendors and partners face an increasing execution and operations management gap, security operations need to evolve and adapt to break away from legacy reactive security approaches.
Understanding that cloud environments are not the same as data center operations and that everything seen and controlled is virtual is crucial to safeguard them. APIs, which are dynamic and often serverless, are used to manage cloud activities. They are often application-centric rather than infrastructure-centric, and DevOps or site reliability engineers can manage them directly through code. Cybercriminals have modified their attack strategies to exploit vulnerabilities as IT teams have accelerate cloud operations.
With auto-scale groups and the flexibility to build, manage, and update infrastructure and applications programmatically, public cloud systems are very dynamic. According to a 2019 Gartner report “Is the cloud secure?“, 99 percent of cloud security breaches will be the fault of the customer. Businesses should be able to monitor changes and scan code in an automated manner to understand how the environment reacts. Furthermore, network diagrams are rapidly becoming obsolete. Within code, the true specification of how the network should look and behave can be found. This has a big impact on how security professionals support, document, and maintain audit readiness.
Finally, cloud-native apps never require a single server since they use containers for compute, function-as-a-service, and multiple other services that public cloud providers supply. Server and network-based solutions have traditionally been used by security professionals to monitor and manage security. In the event that they are not available, an alternative must be found.
Also Read: A Culture of Unity is Crucial to Addressing the Cybersecurity Challenge
Given these factors, enterprises can adopt the following five measures to simplify multi-cloud security:
Make use of security tools that are cloud-native
Each provider offers a set of security tools designed specifically for assessing security configuration, monitoring compliance and misconfigurations, safeguarding workloads, and detecting events. Some providers additionally have SIEM technology built in, allowing them to manage and correlate logs from both the cloud and data centers.
Leverage automation
The key to effective cloud security hygiene is automation. Businesses should safeguard their virtual machines by creating security configurations and using terraform templates or other scripting tools to implement them. If they don’t want to employ a scripting system, they should create basic images for their VMs. Configuration or component library vulnerabilities can also be detected using automated scanning methods. Next, they should create automation to handle events generated by cloud-native security solutions. To search for code vulnerabilities and unsecured third-party software components, automated technologies can be implemented into DevOps CI/CD pipelines.
Businesses can also take advantage of cloud-native scaling and resiliency by taking a snapshot of suspect workloads within a container, server, or application for subsequent examination while also pulling them offline, and then spinning up a new, clean instance. Businesses no longer have to wait for a potential threat to act while they investigate, drastically lowering the time it takes to contain and respond.
Make identity the new perimeter
While virtual networking enables enterprises to implement micro-segmentation and limit network traffic, the cloud’s dynamic nature means that identity has become the crucial access enforcement method and perimeter. For developers, administrators, and anybody else who has access to the accounts, this means using strong authentication. It also entails securing infrastructure and apps with certificates, SAML, and proper API authentication protocols.
Also Read: CISOs Should Concerns Themselves with REvil and Darkside Ransomware Surge
Monitor at Scale
Traditional security monitoring implies that security teams have static IP addresses and predictable activity. Cloud security monitoring, on the other hand, necessitates the ability to monitor virtual, dynamic environments and detect breaches. This means that companies will have to consume and correlate a massive amount of security telemetry. In many circumstances, specialized tools and skillsets are required, and in all cases, a large amount of processing power, storage, and monitoring tools are required.
Utilize third-party tools
Some vendors can help with cloud security management across multiple clouds. Even so, using a third-party tool to standardize security management across several cloud providers may make sense in some cases. While cloud-native technologies can check for security and compliance, a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tool can apply policies and monitor compliance across different cloud providers from a single location. Furthermore, when they distribute application workload across various clouds, enterprises may want to standardize their edge security, including DDoS protection, WAF, and bot control, with a single vendor.
For more such updates follow us on Google News ITsecuritywire News
