With technology and data growing at an unprecedented rate, cloud computing has become an easy answer for businesses around the world to drive growth and innovation. As we quickly approach the second quarter of 2024, the cloud security report’s predictions highlight the challenges of cloud adoption in the cloud security landscape.
Challenges
Gartner Research predicts a paradigm shift in the adoption of public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings. By 2025, a staggering 80% of enterprises are expected to adopt multiple public cloud IaaS solutions, including various Kubernetes (K8s) offerings. This growing reliance on cloud infrastructure raises a critical issue of security, which the Cloud Security Alliance painfully emphasizes.
According to the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), only 23% of organizations report full visibility into their cloud environments. This lack of visibility, despite the enormous potential of cloud technologies, can leave organizations vulnerable to potential threats within their infrastructure. Another issue that further complicates cloud visibility issues is double alerts. A staggering 63% of organizations face duplicate security alerts, hindering security teams’ ability to sort out real noise threats.
The above challenge can be mitigated with a unified approach to security, but it was found that 61% of organizations use between 3 and 6 different tools. The landscape becomes more complicated to understand, highlighting the urgency of covering gaps in security defense mechanisms.
A well-defined security defense mechanism reduces manual intervention by security teams and promotes the need for automation and simplified processes in operations. Security teams that spend most of their time on manual tasks related to security alerts not only discourage efficient use of resources, but also reduce the productivity of teams working to resolve critical security vulnerabilities.
CSA statistics reveal that only 18% of organizations take more than four days to fix critical vulnerabilities, highlighting the urgency of this problem. Such delays leave systems vulnerable to potential breaches and compromises and underscore the urgent need for action. Moreover, the recurrence of the vulnerability within a month of remediation highlights the need for proactive team collaboration.
According to CSA, ineffective collaboration between security and development teams inadvertently creates holes in defenses and increases the risk of exploitation. By promoting communication between these critical teams, organizations can better strengthen their defenses and mitigate security threats.
Clearly, the cloud security landscape requires a more comprehensive approach to gaining visibility into cloud environments. By applying the best practices outlined below, organizations can move closer to their goal of establishing a secure and resilient cloud infrastructure.
Best practices
This section will address the basic pillars of cloud security to protect your cloud assets, starting with the following:
Unified security
One of the main challenges in adopting cloud security is the lack of a unified security framework. The Unified Security Framework consists of various tools and processes that collect information from different systems and present it cohesively on a single screen.
Compared to traditional security tools that require their own set of architecture to operate and then require additional plugins to collect data, unified security solutions are a better way to get a holistic view of an organization’s security posture.
The Unified Security framework consolidates various security processes, such as threat intelligence, access controls, and monitoring capabilities, to simplify visibility and management while facilitating collaboration between different teams, such as IT, security, and compliance.
Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA)
Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) uses a “never trust, always verify” approach. All stages of cloud data communication, regardless of their position in the cloud hierarchy, should be protected by verification mechanisms and adhere to zero-trust solutions.
An effective zero-trust solution implemented over a cloud architecture should inspect all unencrypted and encrypted traffic before it reaches the intended destination, pre-verifying the identity and requested content of requests to access the requested data.
Adaptive custom access control policies should be implemented that not only change contexts based on the attack surface, but also eliminate the risk of any fraudulent moves that compromise device functionality.
By adopting the aforementioned zero-trust practices, organizations can implement robust identity and access management (IAM) with granular protection for applications, data, networks and infrastructure.
Encryption everywhere
Data encryption is a major challenge for many organizations, which can be alleviated by encrypting data at rest and in transit. An encryption-as-a-service solution can be implemented, providing centralized encryption management to authorize traffic across data clouds and centers.
All application data can be encrypted with one centralized encryption flow, which ensures the security of sensitive information. The data will be governed by identity-based policies, which ensure verification of cluster communication and authentication of services based on trusted authorities.
Moreover, data encryption at all layers of the cloud infrastructure—including applications, databases, and storage—increases the overall consistency and automation of cloud security. Automated tools can simplify the encryption process while facilitating consistent enforcement of encryption policies across the infrastructure.
Continuous monitoring of security compliance
Continuous monitoring of compliance with security regulations is another key pillar for strengthening the cloud security landscape. Organizations that work specifically in healthcare (subject to HIPAA regulations) and payments (according to PCI DSS guidelines) include a rigorous assessment of infrastructure and processes to protect sensitive information.
To comply with these regulations, continuous compliance monitoring can be leveraged to automate the continuous scanning of cloud infrastructure for compliance gaps. Solutions can analyze logs and configuration for security risks by leveraging the concept of “compliance as code,” where security considerations are built into every phase of the software development life cycle (SDLC).
By implementing these simplified automated compliance checks and including them at every stage of development, organizations can comply with regulatory mandates while maintaining agility in cloud software delivery.
Conclusion
To conclude, achieving robust cloud security requires using a Unified Security approach with Zero-Trust architecture through continuous encryption and compliance monitoring. By adopting these best practices, organizations can strengthen their defenses against evolving cyber threats, protect sensitive data, and build trust with customers and stakeholders.