Embracing the cloud expands your attack surface while your security budget stays the same. Choosing the right cloud-native application platform is therefore a critical decision to make: manage risk and regulatory compliance across your organization, accelerate app delivery, and remove friction with automated security.
Every dollar spent on security must minimize security risks and simplify security while producing a return on investment (ROI) in the form of better detection or prevention. As an IT leader, finding the tool that meets this requirement isn’t always easy. CISOs and CIOs are tempted to succumb to the shiny toy syndrome: buy the latest tool by claiming to address the security challenges facing their hybrid environment, instead of simplifying and extending security across the entire infrastructure with tools that they already have to protect cloud-native applications.
With cloud adoption on the rise, securing cloud assets is critical to supporting digital transformation efforts and the ongoing delivery of applications and services to customers faster, more securely, and more efficiently.
However, embracing the cloud broadens the attack surface. That attack surface includes private, public, and hybrid environments. A traditional approach to security simply doesn’t provide the level of security needed to protect this environment and requires organizations to have granular visibility into cloud events.
Organizations need a new unified approach, one that gives them the visibility and control they need while supporting the CI/CD pipeline, combining agentless and agentless automated detection and response throughout the life cycle. life of the app.
How to start
To address these challenges head-on, organizations are turning to unified cloud-native application security platforms. But how do IT and business leaders know which boxes these solutions should tick? Which solution is best to address cloud security threats based on the changing adversary landscape?
To help guide the decision-making process, here are four key evaluation points:
1. Cloud protection as an extension of endpoint security
Focusing on endpoint security alone is not enough to secure the hybrid environments that many organizations now need to secure. For these organizations, choosing the right unified security platform for their endpoint and cloud workload is critical.
2. Understanding adversarial actions against your cloud workloads
Real-time threat intelligence is a key consideration when evaluating security platforms. As adversaries step up to exploit cloud services, having the latest intelligence on attacker tactics and successfully applying them is a necessary part of breach prevention.
For example, CrowdStrike researchers have seen adversaries target neglected cloud infrastructure destined for retirement that still contains sensitive data, and adversaries leveraging common cloud services to obfuscate malicious activity.
An appropriate approach to protecting cloud assets leverages enriched threat intelligence to provide a visual representation of the relationships between account roles, workloads, and APIs to provide deeper context for faster, more effective response.
3. Complete visibility into misconfiguration, vulnerabilities, and more
Closing the door to attackers also involves identifying the vulnerabilities and misconfiguration they are most likely to exploit. A robust cloud security approach will weave these capabilities into the CI/CD pipeline, enabling organizations to detect vulnerabilities early.
For example, they can create verified image policies to ensure that only approved images are allowed to pass through the pipeline. By continuously scanning container images for known vulnerabilities and configuration issues, and integrating security with developer toolchains, organizations can accelerate application delivery and empower DevOps teams.
Detecting vulnerabilities is also the task of cloud security posture management technology. These solutions enable organizations to continuously monitor the compliance of all their cloud resources. This capability is critical because misconfiguration is at the heart of many data leaks and breaches. The fact that these solutions strengthen your cloud security strategy will allow you to reduce risk and adopt the cloud with greater confidence.
4. Managed Threat Hunting
Technology alone is not enough. As adversaries hone their craft of avoiding detection, access to managed detection and response (MDR) and advanced cloud threat hunting services can make all the difference in stopping a breach. Managed services should be able to leverage up-to-the-minute threat intelligence to hunt for stealthy and sophisticated attacks. This human touch adds a team of experts who can augment existing security capabilities and improve customers’ ability to detect and respond to threats.
Choose the right cloud-native application security platform
Weighing the differences between security vendors isn’t always straightforward. However, there are some must-haves for cloud security solutions. From detection to prevention to integration with DevOps tools, organizations must adopt the features that place them in the best position to leverage cloud computing as securely as possible.
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