Cloud security is the application of cybersecurity practices and programs to protect data and applications across public and private cloud platforms. Cloud security helps companies solve traditional cybersecurity issues as well as new challenges in cloud environments.

Cloud platform providers are responsible for protecting their physical infrastructure and the core computing, networking, storage, and networking services they provide. However, your customers retain most or all responsibility for securing their applications, monitoring activity, and ensuring security tools are deployed and configured correctly. This division of responsibilities is known as the shared responsibility model. This means that customers can process:

  • Traditional cybersecurity issues affect cloud workloads, which include vulnerability management, application security, social engineering, and incident detection and response.
  • New challenges with cloud platforms such as lack of visibility into cloud security events, rapid infrastructure changes, continuous application delivery, and new threats to cloud management tools.

The Benefits of Cloud Security

Cloud security solutions enable companies to leverage the flexibility, scalability, openness, and lower operating costs of today’s cloud platforms without affecting sensitive data, regulatory compliance, or ongoing business operations.

The benefits of cloud security include the following:

  • Discover weaknesses and configuration errors in the cloud-based infrastructure
  • Make sure that the software code passes the security tests at every step of the development, testing, and deployment process.
  • Monitor use cases across cloud platforms, including workloads running on virtual machines and in containers.
  • Spot signs of advanced attacks like abnormal behavior and evidence of identity theft and sideways movement.
  • Prevent attackers from taking control of the cloud platform’s consoles and attacking cloud resources for criminal purposes such as crypto theft, hosting botnets, and launching defense against attacks.

 

Securing AWS Environments

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a feature-rich environment for hosting and managing workloads in the cloud. Security teams can use a vulnerability management solution to discover and assess EC2 instances and scan them for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and policy violations.

A Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) solution can test web applications for Top Ten OWASP vulnerabilities and other potential attacks and violations of PCI DSS and other regulations. When a DAST solution is integrated with DevOps tools like Jenkins, security tests can be triggered at certain stages of the development process to ensure that vulnerabilities and breaches are identified and fixed before code goes into production.

A SIEM solution can be integrated with Amazon’s management and security services to identify signs of attacks and data protection breaches.  This includes access to logs created by AWS CloudTrails and CloudWatch, as well as services such as Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) flow logs and  Amazon Route 53 DNS logs.

A SIEM solution designed to work with cloud platforms can enrich this log data with additional context from other sources (including endpoints, on-premises systems, and other cloud platforms), report threat indicators, and use advanced security scans to identify attacks early on. and correct quickly.

Security alerts from AWS GuardDuty and other AWS services can be fed directly into a SIEM so that the corporate security team can investigate and respond quickly.

 

Securing Azure Environments

Microsoft Azure is a powerful, flexible, and scalable platform for hosting workloads in the cloud. How can organizations improve the security of workloads running on Azure?

A vulnerability management solution can use Azure Discovery Connection to discover and analyze virtual machines and other assets when they are launched in an Azure environment. Scanning can reveal vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, policy violations, and other security risks. It might be possible to import Azure tags and use them to organize assets into dynamic groups that can be selectively sorted and reported.

A DAST solution can be integrated with Azure DevOps Pipelines so vulnerability checks can be automatically initiated at every stage of continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI / CD) workflows. This helps organizations eliminate web application vulnerabilities early in the development process when they are easier to fix.

Security for Multi-Cloud Environments

Cloud security is not just about ensuring the security of separate cloud platforms independently of one another. Rather, it is about collecting, correlating, analyzing, and reacting to all security data generated by the company and its cloud service providers.

With today’s microservice-based applications and hybrid and multi-cloud architectures, applications can be distributed across multiple cloud platforms and local data centers. Advanced attacks typically begin with endpoints or web applications and then spread across multiple computing environments. Attacks on one cloud platform are often followed by the same attacks on other cloud platforms.

For these reasons, it is important that companies use security solutions that provide visibility and monitoring of their entire IT footprint, including multiple cloud platforms and on-premises data centers.

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