Misconfigurations can be avoided by making a concentrated effort at all stages of usage, from initial contracting to continuing maintenance and updates.
Data breaches caused by cloud misconfigurations are becoming more common in the news. And, given the fast-paced nature of cloud innovation, developer blunders are unavoidable. While there is no simple solution to this problem, knowing why firms failed to fix misconfigurations that resulted in breaches can help the security team better plan their cloud risk management.
According to a collaborative study conducted by VMware and the Cloud Security Alliance, “The State of Cloud Security Risk, Compliance, and Misconfigurations”, 17% of businesses had a cloud security breach owing to a misconfiguration in the previous year. Lack of cloud security expertise, team alignment, and speed are the three key issues that teams trying to operationalize cloud security face, according to the study.
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The knowledge gap in the cloud
In most firms, it is the responsibility of central IT teams to train the entire organization on security best practices. Most businesses are in a precarious position nowadays, with a single security architect sometimes permitting hundreds of developers and other IT workers. Due to a scarcity of cloud security professionals, security problems can spread throughout the organization.
Allowing teams to invest in specialist cloud posture management systems that automate security and compliance standards across the company’s cloud footprint is one method to help them learn and scale as a cybersecurity leader in charge of the cloud strategy.
Teams that aren’t aligned
Improving cloud security governance across an organization necessitates the collaboration of multiple teams, each with slightly different security or compliance goals. Whether in IT security or operations, the major purpose of each of these teams is to assist developers in following cloud best practices.
Failure to agree on a uniform governance plan poses a security or compliance risk, and it can be difficult for developers to strike a balance between release velocity and diverse governance requirements.
Businesses could consider creating a centralized Cloud Center of Excellence or a cross-functional team to assist and regulate the execution of the cloud strategy within the organization to help disparate teams align. Teams can create confidence and agree on security principles and how they should be applied if they have a common platform to strategize and discuss.
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Sluggish security processes
It’s common knowledge that criminals can quickly identify and begin investigating the internet-facing cloud assets. As a result, the speed with which the team can identify and fix a misconfiguration is essential to its ability to avoid a cloud security breach.
Creating guardrails and allowing developers to address misconfigurations before work is deployed should be a top focus for the team. However, no shift-left security system is foolproof, and it is impossible for developers to notice all faults in advance. For effective cloud risk management, a DevSecOps methodology should be supplemented with an over-the-top real-time security monitoring solution.
So, what’s next?
Misconfigurations caused by human error are a primary cause of cloud security breaches. Of course, enabling developers to use the cloud safely while reducing the danger of misconfiguration, is difficult. Learning from other people’s security failures is one of the quickest ways for the team to improve cloud security.
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