Businesses may benefit from unparalleled flexibility via the hybrid cloud approach. However, the hybrid cloud poses cybersecurity threats that, if ignored, might result in severe losses.
For many enterprises, IT infrastructures consist of a mix of public cloud services, private clouds, and on-premises infrastructure—with the latter comprising a constantly decreasing percentage. Hybrid cloud environments can add complexity, reduce visibility, and require different logging and monitoring approaches for security teams.
The usage of cloud services has increased significantly during the last two years, and the trend shows no indications of subsiding. The survey said emerging technologies such as containerization, virtualization, and edge computing are gaining traction and increasing cloud investment. SaaS (software as a service) continues to be the largest market sector.
Rather than installing a single cloud service, businesses opt for a hybrid approach to achieve their business objectives.
Companies may benefit from unparalleled flexibility via the hybrid cloud approach. They can scale up or down capacity as required and migrate data and workloads across various cloud providers. However, the hybrid cloud poses cybersecurity threats that, if ignored, might result in severe losses.
The following are the significant obstacles that security leaders and teams encounter when implementing a hybrid cloud strategy and how they can overcome them:
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Increased complexity, decreased visibility
As businesses expand their public cloud services and add private cloud capabilities, their IT infrastructures become much more complicated regarding administration and security. They lose insight into what is happening in this environment if they do not take action to monitor service consumption.
The prevalence of cloud services often necessitates a paradigm shift in how enterprises handle security. While a hybrid cloud environment may give enterprises more choice and flexibility, IT executives must re-evaluate their security processes and consider any necessary changes. Combining public and private clouds or infrastructure increases an organization’s complexity and risk, making visibility and control critical for protecting a distributed system.
Knowledge and skills gap
The cybersecurity skills shortage has been extensively documented. Many firms struggle to locate qualified candidates for a range of positions but discovering and recruiting security specialists who also understand cloud computing takes the difficulty to a whole new level. This knowledge gap in cloud security may expose organizations to danger, and they must work to fix it before it is too late.
Offering internal and external training is one method. A well-defined duty matrix and operational models may allay worries and facilitate effective governance. Monitoring metrics give insight into the performance of different security teams and the policies applied.
CISOs and other security executives must evaluate the effectiveness of their human resource and talent use. Security teams may need to get familiar with the security functions of two [or more] cloud services in a hybrid cloud environment.
Shifting security responsibilities
Without a well-defined operating model in a hybrid cloud environment, neglected dangers and unmet capabilities might prohibit an organization from expanding and reaching business objectives. Organizations seek to extend private cloud security controls and technological stack to public clouds, which may not always succeed. Without a well-defined operating model in a hybrid cloud environment, neglected dangers and unmet capabilities might limit an organization from expanding and reaching business objectives.
Network protection mismatches
Organizations continue to face significant challenges in network security since current vendor products designed for private clouds may not be adequate for public clouds. Organizations employ containers to enable smooth cloud migration and administration, and a lack of awareness of details such as service mesh and API security may result in container compromise and subsequent exploitation.
The majority of suppliers of public cloud-based security tools support private cloud settings. However, standard vendor solutions designed for on-premises or remote cloud environments may not extend to or offer all the functionality required for the public cloud. Vendor analysis is critical and should be conducted after identifying all requirements and use cases.
The cloud should use a mature cybersecurity model
It’s not about adding more controls or tools when integrating the cloud into an already-existing enterprise security program. Evaluating the resources and business requirements is necessary to create an impactful new strategy for the organizational culture and cloud security. CISOs must establish visibility and control and manage an effective hybrid or multi-cloud security program to coordinate workload deployment through efficient threat management.
Every security team must start by gaining visibility using the appropriate tools. However, a CISO’s experience managing day-to-day security operations does not allow them to assess whether a security model is developed enough for the cloud. The response should instead heavily consider the findings of a security posture management assessment.
Continuously engage in security posture management exercises. Through ongoing monitoring and auditing, these assessments provide actionable intelligence about an organization’s security operations programs and overall breach readiness.
All cybersecurity models did not support the cloud operating models of today. A security posture management tool can automate the detection and correction of risks in IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS cloud infrastructure environments. Additionally, organizations can use cloud security posture management for DevOps integration, incident response, compliance monitoring, and risk visualization and assessment. Such evaluations can also consistently apply the best practices for cloud security to environments using containers, hybrid clouds, and multiple clouds.
Security teams can better predict the steps that IT and security teams may need to take to protect data from the next unanticipated technological advancement or shift in consumer behavior by evaluating the maturity of the cloud cybersecurity model. Organizations are also a step closer to aligning their security strategies with business needs related to the cloud.
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Moving the cybersecurity paradigm to the left
A shift to the left entails including cybersecurity safeguards and testing best practices through the application development lifecycle. Investment in a DevSecOps mindset and set of skills is necessary for this strategy. It can shorten the time to market and save time and money when implemented correctly. Early detection and correction of security vulnerabilities is the goal.
Due to the popularity of Agile development best practices and advancements in cloud technology, application development has already undergone this shift to the left. Extensive detection and response, security orchestration, automation, response tools, container platforms, and easily consumable public cloud provisioning resources are a few of the technologies that are becoming more common. Without human intervention, these tools can manage routine security operations center alerts, plan an appropriate response, and catalog service ticket infrastructure to account for incidents.
A unified, tightly integrated security fabric approach to cloud security is necessary to reduce the risks connected with multi- and hybrid cloud strategies. As businesses use technological advancements, cybercriminals attack corporate networks by getting around security measures. These network infiltration attacks frequently use cloud configuration errors that IT teams have created as their main attack vector.
Companies can reduce management complexity using a security fabric approach to reducing cloud risk. Organizations can do away with the layers of management complexity that IT teams find difficult to navigate by deploying a single, ML-driven platform instead of multiple-point solutions. An approach to cloud security that is more effective and efficient unifies all security operations behind a single pane of glass. Once all cloud configurations are visible to CISOs and security teams, the risk gets reduced. IT security teams can improve cybersecurity metrics by utilizing next-generation ML to speed up the detection and mitigation of threats. CISOs can produce the resilience required to reduce risk while achieving business objectives with tightly integrated solutions.
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