Cloud Security — Approach and Mitigation
Cloud Security — What makes it unique?
Cloud security comprises policies, controls, procedures, and technologies that protect cloud-based systems, data, and infrastructure in the Cloud. From authenticating access to filtering traffic, cloud security to optimize and protect an organization. One of the key responsibilities of system administrators is to harden the systems, and compliance standards are met on the servers hosting the workloads. Let’s imagine the same level of control and segmentation on the Cloud where the servers deployed. Cloud Security ensures the need to protect the Cloud’s workload and the overall posture of services running in the Cloud.
In Cloud Security, one of the leading frameworks used is Zero trust security, which means that no entity can trust by default from inside or outside the network, and verification is needed from every device trying to access resources on the network. This added layer of Security has shown to prevent data breaches. A zero-trust approach to cloud security does not eliminate the parameter. It uses network and application layer micro-segmentation to move the boundary as close as possible to free apps and protected surface areas.
Realizing that on-premises Security is different is key to securing your Cloud as in on-prem security appliances need to deploy at each location compared to securing your resources in Cloud.
Identifying Threat Models and Attack Surface
Data protection is one of the key aspects which is evaluated by clients before migrating to the Cloud. As stated in an article in Khaleej Times, the survey points out that 75 percent of organizations in the UAE (United Arab Emirates) experiences cloud security incidents in a multi-cloud environment. It includes Malware (54 percent), Ransomware (28 percent), Compromised accounts (17 percent), Crypto-jacking (17 percent), and Exposed data (15 percent). By observing these security incidents, it can be clear that organizations fail to understand their threat model and attack surface to attain Security.
Extensive due diligence should be performed before a Cloud Data Migration Plan and during the design of Cloud Architecture to secure your cloud platform. This process helps in identifying threats of infrastructure to discover models on your Cloud. It starts with minimizing infrastructure to essential services and optimizing existing services.
While building the Cloud Architecture, the key questions to address are what kind of threats impact me on the infrastructure during an attack for a full-proof compliance plan.
Security tools that can help in this process play a significant role by integrating hybrid and multi-Cloud.
Let’s look at some of these tools and how they ensure these standards. Most cloud platforms have their security offerings like AWS and Azure: AWS Config, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Security Hub or Azure Information Protection, and DLP (Data Loss Prevention), Azure Advanced Threat Protection, Azure Security Center.
Securing your Cloud and Hybrid Environment
Adhering to Cloud security concerns, the consumers must ensure encryption of the endpoints. Misconfiguration (68%), unauthorized access (58%), insecure interfaces (52%), and account hijacking (50%) are the key issues faced in cloud security, as reported in computerweekly.com.
To fix the following concerns, IaaS and SaaS models to utilize as per the compliance check.
Cloud security tools like Palo Alto Prisma cloud, Azure Sentinel, and Sysdig enables posture management (CSPM) and workload protection (CWPP) in the Cloud to manage security concerns, detect anomalies, ensure compliance, and provide runtime defense. The attack surface varies from configurations related to services, network, and IAM to each workload in the Cloud, be it servers, containers, or virtual machines. These tools proactively identify and mitigate cloud security risks along with misconfiguration reporting and automatically fix issues by continually monitoring and detecting using API calls and running next to operating systems.
Besides, businesses with multi-cloud platforms can benefit from centralized managed of all CSPM and CWPP features under a single dashboard, helping them for swift actions on policy violations, detection, and automatic remediation. By providing the choice of cloud-based SaaS or on-prem, these tools work seamlessly in heterogeneous environments such as Windows, Linux, Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and GCP Cloud Functions.
At Adfolks, we understand the need for CSPM and CWPP to provide a foundation for any organization in securing their cloud environments. Along with hardening the environment, these methods ensure different compliance standards met before moving systems to production.
There are various tools to ensure Security, but the main factor to consider is the compliance plan and the endpoint encryption to eliminate the risk of cloud security incidents. Cloud security concerns need to be optimized through cloud security and continuously be updated in the infrastructure, as and when required.
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