The Five Universal Fundamentals for Securing Your Cloud
The term "misconfiguration" can be taken to mean something as simple as pressing the "drive" button on your car while the parking brake is still on.
As soon as you figure out what's wrong, you let go of the brake. But what if your vehicle has a plethora of configuration errors? Because no one has the time to perform a thorough visual inspection of their vehicle's many systems before each trip, even if a single malfunction could lead to catastrophic failure or even personal damage, most people just drive without performing any of these checks.
The cloud client is also responsible for setting and maintaining a huge number of complicated configurations in the cloud infrastructure environment. Cloud misconfigurations by customers can lead to system outages or serious security incidents. Misconfigurations abound in any enterprise cloud setup.
More than one-third of cloud security breaches and leaks were caused by misconfiguration, according to the State of Cloud Security 2021 Report. According to a warning from the National Security Agency (NSA), if cloud resources are misconfigured, hackers can gain access to data and services. Instances of cloud service policy errors or misunderstandings of shared responsibility may result in misconfigurations, which have a range of consequences, from account compromise to denial of service. "It is difficult to secure cloud resources because of the rapid pace of [cloud service provider] innovation,"
Minor and Major Misconfigurations
Security specialists aren't unfamiliar with the concept of locating and correcting computer configuration errors. Network protocols and firewall ports can be configured in the data center, and a misconfiguration here could potentially be a security concern that needs to be addressed.
There are many different types of misconfigurations in the cloud, from simple mistakes like leaving a risky port exposed to more complex architectural design faults that can be difficult for security teams to detect. But despite its complexity, cloud computing is all software-based, so errors may be avoided. If misconfigurations can be avoided by software engineering, rather than physical data center architecture, then it's a success story.
Cloud infrastructure isn't built, it's programmed, and this means that it's more difficult to maintain. And the people who write the code, often developers or DevOps engineers, are making judgments regarding the cloud infrastructure's setup and then altering it on a regular basis. The capacity to rapidly build and upgrade apps, which is a major driver of cloud adoption, necessitates that they have this power. Every shift, however, brings with it new and different risks.
APIs are at the heart of cloud computing, influencing both how we use it and how attackers take advantage of it. Different cloud resources and apps can communicate with each other thanks to APIs, which operate as "middlemen" in software. Security teams can't rely on any network perimeter to identify and block incoming attacks because there is no set IT architecture in a single location.
The API surface that is used to configure and run the cloud must be the primary focus of security teams. This control plane is used by cloud clients to do things like create virtual servers, change network routes, and get data access. Attackers can also exploit the control plane to learn about the cloud environment and move laterally, as well as retrieve data once they have a foothold. In the cloud, this is the attack area.
An attacker must first get access to the control plane to conduct a successful cloud breach. It is very difficult to identify control plane compromise attempts since they are extremely rapid "smash-and-grab" exploits that do not use standard networks that can be tracked. It's the developers and DevOps engineers who are designing and managing cloud infrastructure who are taking a different approach to cloud security.
Instead of purchasing physical equipment and then cramming software onto it, developers that use the cloud create the infrastructure for their applications from the ground up. Building cloud infrastructure is done using code, which means developers and DevOps primarily own that process. This new paradigm pushes the security team to become the domain experts on secure cloud architecture and transfer that knowledge to the developers to assist them to design securely. With policy as code, security teams can accomplish this.
领英推荐
Allows security teams to describe policies and compliance standards in a programming language that applications can utilize to verify the right setups. To automatically detect potentially harmful conditions, policies can be used as code by programs. All cloud stakeholders are on the same page about security without ambiguity or dispute on the rules, and different teams are enabled to apply policy at each stage of the software development life cycle (SDLC).
You need an automated approach for spotting and correcting misconfigurations in cloud services because they are likely to grow over time, which means that your security staff is already likely under a lot of pressure. When the automation is based on policy and code, it can be scaled up as the complexity and use of the cloud increase. Developers can apply the same policies to guarantee that infrastructure is secure before deployment, reducing the incidence of security team misconfigurations.
When it comes to securing their cloud infrastructure, companies who have done it right have a few things in common. To better secure cloud environments, the first step is to have an understanding of your environment and the cloud infrastructure development lifecycle (SDLC) and to begin to think like a hacker in order to find weaknesses in your design. If you’re entirely focused on eradicating specific misconfigurations, you need to get it right 100 percent of the time, when hackers just need to get lucky once. You need to know what an intruder could do if they manage to get into your system.
Another important aspect of a well-run business is preventative and security design. Detecting and stopping an attacker once they've gotten access to your environment and breached the control plane is impossible. Cloud infrastructures must be designed in a way that prevents adversaries from accessing the control plane and minimizes any potential penetration of a breach.
The third thing we see successful companies do is equip developers and DevOps engineers with tools that assist them in designing and building safe cloud infrastructure. This is a paradigm shift in the way your security team works with developers and operations, as everyone is now incorporating security into their daily routines and routines into their daily work. As security architects, security teams serve as a model for their peers. Policy as code is once again the technology enabler here.
Cloud security is built on the foundation of policy as code in every successful company. For a cloud security program to grow with your use of the cloud without increasing your security staff, you must leverage policy as code as the technology foundation. You can't consistently communicate policy across the organization or give developers the tools they need to operate more securely if the policy isn't implemented as code.
Measuring what matters is the final and final cloud security need. Your progress on cloud security can only be gauged by determining where you are now and where you want to go. In the cloud, how much danger are you willing to take? How quickly can your teams deliver cloud-based innovation while maintaining security? When it comes to cloud security, how much time are you spending on it?
To put it another way, how long do your developers have to wait for security personnel to manually approve deployments? Cloud misconfigurations are evaluated and prioritized by security teams, who then send them to DevOps teams for correction. How much time and effort are required to handle architectural security? How much time and effort are required to handle architectural security issues when compared to building a system from the ground up that is already secure? How much time and effort are required to handle architectural security issues?
Rather than seeing cloud security as a hindrance to innovation, successful firms see it as an opportunity to create software engineering solutions that will allow everyone to move more quickly and more securely.
Finally, those who have mastered cloud security do so by paying close attention to these five fundamentals.