Top 4 Cloud Security Concerns and How to Resolve Them
In cloud security, there are many issues that organizations are trying to sort through. Here are a few of the most prominent and how to address them.
As organizations move from traditional, on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, they anticipate the benefits – increased agility, reduced costs, flexibility and ease of use – but security concerns are quick to follow. Many security best practices and tools organizations previously relied upon, such as traditional endpoint antivirus offerings and network scanning, are trivialized in the cloud, and a security approach based on application programming interfaces, or APIs, becomes the new benchmark.
When it comes to cloud security today, organizations are trying to sort through many issues. Here are a few of the most prominent and how to address them:
1. Viewing the Cloud as Another Product
You can’t assess your cloud security today and assume your assessment will hold true tomorrow. It probably won’t hold true an hour from now. The cloud is rapidly changing, and security within it must be agile and continuous, or it won’t be effective. Traditional security approaches were not created to fit the rapidly changing, elastic infrastructure of the cloud. As attacks become increasingly automated, you need to adopt new security tools and techniques for this new ecosystem. Terraform® and Ansible® are both great options for automating your security stack. Here are a few options to consider.
2. Realizing That Traditional Scanning Just Won’t Do
Traditional data center security relies upon being deployed in an application or operating system as well as the use of traditional network-based IP-scanning techniques. This approach doesn’t work in the cloud. Users run application stacks on abstracted services and platform-as-a-service layers or use API-driven services that render conventional security approaches ineffective. Cloud environments are so fundamentally different from their static, on-premises counterparts that they require an entirely new way of administering security practices. This means adopting new cloud security technologies that provide complete visibility through a combination of cloud provider APIs and integration with other third-party tools.
Click here to learn about how to get visibility and context for your cloud deployments. You can also take advantage of these free API scanner tools.
3. Differentiating Real Security Issues From “Noise”
Teams working in the cloud benefit from speed and acceleration, but it’s important to recognize how different the approach to security must be. Discerning real vulnerabilities from infrastructure “noise” is a major challenge. All this change and noise make manual inspection of infrastructure too slow to be effective. The API-centric cloud world requires a new way for security teams to protect their environments, but not all cloud and IT teams really understand these security nuances. Security automation is one way to overcome the knowledge and skills shortfall that exists in many development and IT shops.
Click here to learn how to better automate and enable your security operations center.
4. Lack of Compliance With API-Driven Cloud Security
The emergence of API-driven cloud services has changed the way security needs to be architected, implemented and managed. Although the API is a completely new threat surface to defend, it provides the ability to automate detection and remediation. As compliance benchmarks, like the CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark, are released, they will provide the means to assess our security posture against industry-defined best practices. These help to ensure we’re taking the right steps to keep our customers, employees, infrastructure and intellectual property secure. Cloud migrations are happening quickly, and compliance with rapidly-evolving security requirements is an ever-increasing challenge that must be resolved through automation in order to claim success.
Click here to learn more about how to meet data and regulatory mandates.
Whether your organization was born in the cloud or is migrating to the public cloud, building out private cloud or dealing with a complex hybrid cloud strategy, chances are the cloud is a part of your reality. You need to adapt your security practices so your organization can thrive in the digital age without compromising data protection.
