As enterprises exponentially transition towards digitalization by adopting cloud computing a set of unique security risks and vulnerabilities arises. It is important to set organizational and individual practices and goals towards cybersecurity for digital transformation to safeguard the customer data and applications shared with public cloud platforms. Following are some recommended measures to build a robust security posture:
Cloud Security Recommendations for Enterprise Data and Applications
Embrace DevSecOps
DevSecOps introduces security and risk management protocols into the DevOps workflows. It ensures secure and compliant code creation right from the early stages of development by adopting latest cybersecurity practices. Most cloud projects are initiated by business team and leadership and managed by DevOps teams. It is commonplace that the security team is introduced to review the architecture when the project is already deployed into the cloud.
Bringing the security and governance towards the beginning ensures business and architecture decisions are made with a security-first approach. This lightens the load of maintaining a secure environment and achieving compliance in a fire-fighting mode. As enterprises embraces cloud-native application development DevSecOps becomes a fundamental requirement to their digital transformation.
Understand the Shared Security Model
Public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS),
Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure follow a shared responsibility model when it comes to security. In this model, the provider is responsible for ensuring that the platform is always on, available, and up to date.
On the other hand, the customer, is responsible for protecting their own applications and client-side data running within the public cloud. As a customer, you’re in complete control of your security strategy to safeguard your customer data or intellectual property while the public cloud provider offers a number of options for how you may set up and configure its security tools.
Use a Zero Trust Strategy
Traditional, perimeter-centric security strategies fail to provide adequate visibility, control, and protection of user and application traffic. Zero Trust architectures apply the principle of “never trust, always verify” to all entities — users, devices, applications, and packets — regardless of what they are or their location relative to the bounds of the enterprise and cloud network
By establishing Zero Trust boundaries — just as they would to effectively compartmentalize different segments of their own networks — companies can better protect critical data hosted in the cloud from unauthorized applications or users, reduce the exposure of vulnerable systems, and prevent the movement of malware throughout their network.
Know Your Potential Exposure
Public cloud usage is popular due to the ease of spinning up compute and storage resources. Employees doing what’s “right for the business right now” versus what’s “right for the business” may create security loopholes if the environment isn’t configured properly. It’s imperative to know who in your organization is using the cloud and ensure the environment is configured correctly.
To reduce cloud risk, do the following:
Ensure proper configuration
Configure the environment with security best practices in mind. Establish secure defaults for identity and resource access, enable all audit and security logging capabilities, and properly segment workloads into dedicated environments. This gives you a secure baseline from which to implement workload-specific configurations.
Implement multifactor authentication (MFA)
To minimize the risk of an attacker gaining access using stolen credentials, MFA should be set up. Using intelligent challenge response mechanisms can also protect apps in the cloud from unauthorized access.
Lock down administrative interfaces
Secure Shell (SSH) on port 22 is a common practice for securely managing cloud servers, yet it’s often left exposed in AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure environments for convenience. Other administrative ports — including those for container management systems, application admin consoles, and other similar interfaces — should be strictly controlled and protected.
Understand the Attacker
Attackers leverage automation to find potential targets within minutes. After they’ve identified those targets, they look for weaknesses, check default passwords, probe for SSH misconfigurations, and so on. A major cybersecurity company spun up a test environment with a database and a web server in the public cloud to highlight the effects of attackers’ automation capabilities. The environment was probed from more than 35 countries with more than 25 different attacker applications. A full global scan of all AWS, GCP, and Azure servers took 23 minutes to complete and revealed tens of thousands of exposed systems. Unlike in a private data center, where there is less concern about public exposure, resources in the public cloud are widely exposed and should be handled carefully.
Evaluate Your Security Options
There are several security options to choose from when moving to the cloud.
Native security services
Cloud service providers offer native security services, including security groups, web application firewalls (WAFs), configuration monitoring, and many more. These tools are a good starting point for those without added security technologies but should be supplemented with enterprise-grade security offerings.
Security platform
The goal for many organizations is to eliminate a fragmented security approach where the security tools don’t communicate with each other to successfully prevent attacks. To overcome this challenge, organizations
typically adopt a security strategy that utilizes a platform approach. This approach delivers security through in-line, application programming interface (API)–based and host-based protection technologies working together to minimize attack opportunities.
Do-it-yourself (DIY) security
Some organizations choose a DIY approach to securing cloud workloads, using custom scripts and open-source projects to protect deployments.
Build Strong Threat Intelligence
Cloud security starts with analyzing ingested data to find the underlying threats. Security tools must be able to share this threat information with other parts of the cloud, points of enforcement, and the broader enterprise-wide IT deployment. Then, to help fight large-scale attacks and ensure future detection of similar attacks, the organization should share this information with the broader community and security industry. As you build your cloud security strategy for your environment, ensure that your security tools are capable of sharing threat intelligence across your broader enterprise and receiving threat data from external sources. To fast-track secure cloud adoption, consult cloud security experts through communities or vendors. The guidance will ensure you build the right security foundation to enable your business in the cloud.
Are you looking for a cloud security expert team to frame your security posture with the right tools and practices? Reach out to us
Maintain a Proactive Stance Towards Threat Identification
If you’re constantly reacting to an attack or attempt to attack, you’re always going to be a step behind. Adopting a prevention philosophy is critical to dealing proactively with threats. Strong prevention minimizes the number of events that require detection and response, enabling you to rapidly stop sophisticated attacks before the attackers can steal confidential data. Strengthening cybersecurity for enterprises on the cloud involves taking the following steps:
Provide complete visibility
The combination of knowledge and enforcement is a powerful security tool. It’s critical to identify all your cloud resources, ongoing cloud activity, relative risk tied to current security measures, and any changes to your environment. With this knowledge, you can deploy a more consistent security policy globally to protect your cloud from known and unknown attacks.
Legacy security tools and techniques designed for traditional data centers must evolve to be relevant in the cloud. For a complete perspective, ensure that your security tools give you full visibility into Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) resources.
Reduce opportunities for attack
Using a Zero Trust (“never trust, always verify”) security approach and application identity as a means of enforcing a positive security model. You can align application usage to business needs, control application functions, and stop threats from gaining access and moving laterally within your cloud and network infrastructure.
Prevent known threats
Leveraging globally shared threat intelligence to apply threat prevention policies is a key step in adhering to a prevention philosophy. These threat prevention policies can block known threats, including vulnerability exploits, malware, and malware-generated command-and-control traffic.
Prevent unknown threats
Unknown and potentially malicious files must be analyzed based on hundreds of behaviors. If a system determines that a file is malicious, it deploys a prevention mechanism quickly and automatically. The organization can then use the information it gains from file analysis to continually improve all other prevention capabilities.
Secure IaaS and PaaS
Development teams and cloud administrators are responsible for ensuring that their data and applications are secure, as defined in the shared responsibility model. Here are some specific critical steps you should take to ensure that you’re doing your part:
Disable root account API access keys
A root user is the login credential you used to create your cloud account. Best practices recommend that the root user is used only to create your initial administrative accounts. You should then complete all future administration through newly created identity and access management (IAM) accounts.
Enable multifactor authentication (MFA) tokens everywhere
MFA should be required of all users, both inside and outside your organization. Reduce the number of users with admin rights. The more granular you are with access to your cloud accounts, the more you help protect your business if and when something is compromised.
Rotate all keys regularly
Credentials, passwords, and API access keys should all be rotated on a regular basis. If a credential is compromised, this limits the amount of time that a key is valid.
Limit traffic from 0.0.0.0/0
Allowing traffic from 0.0.0.0/0 means that every machine, everywhere can make a connection to your cloud resources — and it also means that your systems can make outbound connections to every system everywhere. Instead, use security groups and network access control lists to limit both inbound and outbound traffic.
Turn on logging everywhere
Too often, activity logging in cloud environments is turned off or never turned on. Without logs, how will you ever know if your environment has been breached?
Conclusion
Cloud security is fundamental to the future of your organizational security for safeguarding data, digital assets, and intellectual property against cyberattacks and compliance failure in cloud environments. Reviewing your compliance and ensuring that your service provider meets your business’ security requirements is a key assessment before establishing a new cloud computing service. Staying updated on the latest security threats and vendor security updates and fixes is another area of responsibility. Your adoption of a strong cloud security practice, combined with your cloud security provider’s maximum-security measures, can keep your cloud environment secure.
