Don't Fortify, Amplify: The New Cloud Security Stack
Don't Fortify, Amplify: The New Cloud Security Stack
We’ve seen this conflict pivot play out in real time. Synergy Research Group reported cloud
spending rose 37% to $29 billion during the first quarter in 2020, and, according to Canalys,
cloud infrastructure spending in the U.S. grew 29% in the first quarter of 2021 to $18.6 billion.
For example, just as our ways of working have changed, compliance standards have evolved
along with them. This has introduced new guidelines for organizations that previously may not
have thought about industry compliance.
These forces of migration, adoption and transformation make the cloud more important
than ever for businesses to address. Yet the same opportunities that make the cloud vital
for business are the same that make it attractive to malicious threat actors. According to
the (ISC)2 2021 Cloud Security Report, 96% of cybersecurity professionals state they are at
least moderately concerned about public cloud security. And it’s for good reason; 80% of
organizations experienced a cloud data breach in the last 18 months.
To balance the requirements of both speed and protection, there is a need for a security
framework that can keep up with—and support—the rapid iteration required of businesses.
Remote work diversifies connectivity, meaning new threats are more easily introduced.
Organizations need tools to not only help navigate the shift, but to also increase protection
against the growing list of risks. These risks include:
Authenticating
Employee Identity
With more than 60% of security breaches caused by
leveraged credentials, it’s even more critical to ensure
an organization’s users are who they say they are.
By granting every employee access to core material,
a bad actor only needs to successfully impersonate
an employee to gain access to as much data as that
employee can reach.
97 %
It should come as no surprise that the cloud now dominates
enterprise IT strategies. As referenced above, 97% of organizations
use at least one public cloud, 92% report having a multi-cloud
strategy, and 82% have a hybrid approach that combines public and
private clouds.
90 %
Just as our ways of working have changed, the work itself has
followed. As most organizations know, open source software comes
with many advantages: it saves time, money and can be used to
better adapt to customer needs. But open source software can’t be
an open door. That’s why an organization needs rigorous clarity on
who it’s letting in––and who it’s keeping out.
5%
Compliance costs more than just headaches. In 2020, more than
29% of organizations reported that their compliance costs were as
much as 5% of their total revenues, and another 32% were entirely
unsure of what it actually cost them.
Take, for example, GDPR. While these data and privacy laws are
specific to the European Union, they can affect your business
anywhere. In fact, under Article 3 of the GDPR, your company has
to weigh GDPR compliance for any data collected of EU citizens,
regardless of where you’re based.
This tipping point underscored the need for a new cloud security stack capable of meeting
these new needs. The cloud security stack is comprised of five components: Identity & Access
Management, Zero Trust Network Access, Open Source Security, Cloud Workload Protection,
and Compliance Automation. With each of these components in place, organizations can more
effectively avoid security breaches, data leaks, and targeted attacks while maintaining the
benefits of cloud operations.
01
Identity & Access Management
Integrate multi-factor authentication and single sign-on for
employees’ remote access workflows.
03
Open Source Security
Monitor and detect open source dependency with
smart alerting.
04
Cloud Workload Protection
Minimize permissions and detect misconfigurations in
public clouds.
05
Compliance Automation
Enable automation of multiple compliance tasks to reduce
regulatory burdens.
Most companies experience a huge disconnect on IAM. They operate from a time when usernames
and passwords were acceptable for their security needs, which is insufficient for an environment
with a substantial amount of web-traffic driven by malicious bots. Meanwhile stopgap solutions, like
the infamous CAPTCHA, can slow workers down without doing enough to protect organizations.
Correctly applied, IAM and SAML work together to create SSO policies which operate as a
frictionless single source of truth to identify users at scale. This creates a secure and speedy
working process, enabling organizations to automate role provisioning without giving excessive
permissions and minimizing access for bad actors. Business growth requires more team members
and more accounts, so creating a secure path to onboarding is the easiest way to ensure the
organization can grow without jeopardizing cloud data.
This level of security matters because authentication methods without IAM can often be exploited
by bad actors. Recently, sophisticated phishing campaigns successfully exploited authentication for a
Florida Hospital, holding systems ransom and releasing sensitive data. And a hacker in California was
able to remotely access a waste-treatment plant by impersonating an employee.
In both these cases, authentication was successfully spoofed without much difficulty; simple
usernames and passwords can be easily accessed or stolen. Fortunately, IAM solutions prioritize
security with MFA, ensuring that only those with privileges can access their accounts.
Extensive Integrations
To ensure productivity and protection, the ideal IAM solution integrates with
most business applications through SAML or SWA connectivity, while offering
API integrations for any ancillary applications. The ability to sync with employee
directories, such as AD, LDAP, G-Suite, and Office365, supports timely permission
management.
Lifecycle Automation
Lifecycle automation enables IT teams to implement workflow-like logic triggered
by changes in employee directories. This will allow permission-related procedures to
automatically roll out upon onboarding, role changes, or offboarding.
In comparison to outdated models that “trust, but verify” users, zero trust architecture instead
requires organizations to actively monitor and validate that a user––and their device––have the
right privileges before allowing connection to any enterprise or cloud assets.
This process isn’t just safer, it’s easier. By applying zero trust, you could create an access portal
that customizes access and permissions for users. This limits user access to only what they need
to do their jobs. And, by linking that portal through SSO, you can link applications to your LDAPl
and have increased transparency. This ensures everyone is who they should be, doing what they
should be.
That’s why enforcement of zero trust policies rely on real-time visibility into user credentials and
attributes. Doing so allows an organization’s security plan to be both proactive and responsive to
a variety of potential threats.
By implementing a zero trust architecture into the cloud security stack, an organization
essentially eliminates any trust with the network. Requiring users to verify who they are (every
time) enhances legitimate application access.
Since open source work is publicly maintained, no one properly manages the work. The result is
that many open source packages have dependencies, often two or three layers deep. And, despite
the common misconception that the latest version of a project will work perfectly without bugs or
vulnerabilities, we’ve seen time and time again that isn’t the case.
To continue working collaboratively and nimbly in open source workflows, it’s crucial to apply
customized security solutions that continuously monitor and detect open source vulnerabilities.
Doing so allows organizations to track a baseline for safe work while being primed for alerts on any
potential problems.
For example, with open source security solutions in the cloud security stack, organizations can
eliminate potential problems before they emerge by scanning Git repositories, containers, and
infrastructure-as-code prior production.
Furthermore, by integrating open source security throughout the CI/CD pipeline, these scanning
solutions can provide vulnerability scanning and remediation capabilities directly within
developer’s IDEs as they code. This offers unparalleled visibility and clarity for an organization’s
team, creating the ability to automatically scan code-changes as a check-gate.
This proactive measure can shift-left the entire security process before issues snowball, allowing
an organization to reap the benefits of open source work and collaboration with confidence.
Ultimately, it means organizations can move quickly and safely.
Container Support
Third-party container technology, like Kubernetes’ base images, can accidentally
include dependency vulnerabilities. Because applications inherit everything that
comes with third-party software––including the vulnerabilities––security solutions
need to be prepared to audit an organization’s dependencies, as well.
Automated Reporting
The security stack should allow an organization to track organizational trends and
vulnerability fix rates across teams and companies to provide real-time insights and
data. Not only does this reduce the burden of management and compliance auditing
reports, but it also provides insight and data to compare against going forward. This
ensures a consistent and clear security report to guide business decisions.
{
Open source security supports shift-left security,
allowing an organization to reap the benefits of open
source work and collaboration with confidence.
}
Part of this problem is the order of magnitude of complexities within a cloud environment; the
amount of things that could be misconfigured are enormous. There seems to be a data breach
in the news every day; resources are left with open access to the internet, most commonly S3
buckets and elastic search databases.
With a CWPP in your cloud security stack, you gain a single unified dashboard that provides
visibility into any anomalies across the entire cloud infrastructure. This creates a reinforced
security stack that replaces the need to maintain security across multiple isolated points.
Furthermore, these solutions provide AI-powered detection of any indicators of the access abuses
that might precede a security breach. This is especially crucial given the continuously changing
nature of the cloud; with no central visibility, it can be difficult to track changes (such as
configurations and team collaboration) made by malicious users.
Running against your data against the CIS foundation global standard baseline set of rules can be
tremendously helpful, as well. These rules provide a helpful baseline to help organizations take
sporadic events and build them into a meaningful attack timeline with up-to-the-minute updates.
Worth noting is that these rules are customizable; you can have your environment scanned based
on your own rules, as well.
Automating tools to constantly monitor environments for security or policy violations offers
organizations much-needed security without disrupting the rapid collaboration the cloud
provides.
Consolidated Visibility
Existing platform-specific point security products are ineffective at detecting
complex attacks. A holistic solution can flag anomalies across an organization’s
entire cloud (or multi-cloud) infrastructure in a single dashboard.
Maintain a compliance-ready
posture
Compliance automation solutions provide CMDB
and protection services for private customer
information and offer features that automate
compliance-ready reporting.
That’s why compliance can no longer be something that’s written as a set of rules; your
compliance program needs to be automated.longer be something that’s written as a set of rules;
your compliance program needs to be automated.
Automating your compliance efforts means your environment is being continually scanned, cycling
with active remediation capabilities. Ultimately, doing so translates to better preparedness as it
relates to handling your compliance program with less resource-intensive manual work.
This is especially important as regulations and compliance standards become ubiquitous across
industries and geographies. Understandably, concern is mounting around how best to manage this
extensive and ever-changing landscape. In fact, 69% of executives are not confident that their current
risk management practices will be enough to meet future needs.
That concern resonates in a connected world, where even local compliance shifts like GDPR can
impact your company. Companies need to be prepared not just to meet compliance requirements
but to earn their customers’ trust.
By applying an automated compliance solution in the cloud security stack, an organization can be
automatically monitored for changes in relevant standards, leveraging notifications around any
pertinent changes.
Implementing these features enables an organization to continue its pace of innovation knowing it
can adhere to compliance regulations. This approach reduces time and costs, letting teams move
quickly and securely while meeting compliance.
Easy Integration
As with many SaaS-based products, integration is key to achieving customer
adoption. Compliance solutions should be built with human-centered design,
enabling both quick implementation and out-of-the-box integrations with common
data-rich applications. By safely working with existing tools and programs, your
compliance solution should be a natural fit into your existing work process.
Gap Analysis
A gap analysis of existing data system practices can produce a simple roadmap
to ensuring compliance with any new regulations. This significantly reduces the
team’s workload while providing a holistic view into the company’s compliance
status on a daily basis. Doing so will ensure you’re always ready to find and
remedy the gaps that could emerge in a changing environment.
Performance/Speed Benefits
IAM and ZTNA reduce security friction for employees, thus increasing productivity and satisfaction.
IAM, open source security, compliance automation, and CWP, automate processes to roll out immediately, with no
delay, manual work, or human errors.
ZTNA and CWP are designed to intercept breach attempts extremely fast, with their anomaly detection and correlation
capabilities.
Open source security speeds up the very core of the business, allowing faster product development by the
automated detection of errors and risks even before they make it to the code.
Security Benefits
Enable full visibility into the predominant attack surfaces of cloud enterprises.
Cloud workload protection gives control and manageability over cloud infrastructures and possible misconfigurations.
IAM and ZTNA work as gatekeepers to prevent threats from gaining access to the enterprise network and applications.
Cost Benefits
Save production resources by providing a holistic solution that secures your nimble way of working.
Open source security solutions immediately save production resources by providing a safer way to engage with
nimble programing.
Cloud workload protection reduces the costs of added security personnel to monitor malicious activity.
Open source security applications eliminate vulnerabilities in code dependencies.
Additional cost benefits include saving time and resources associated with compliance audits, as well as employee
onboarding/offboarding efforts.
Shift-left security implements stringent protections early in the SDLC. This is done intentionally to ensure security
isn’t an afterthought of design, but rather the foundation on which those projects are built.
Security integrates directly into development and operations workflows, ensuring more opportunities to shift left to
find and fix problems at the earlier stages when they’re six times cheaper to fix.
Compliance solutions reduce the time and effort required across multiple teams by applying automation and
continuous evidence-gathering.
Though each benefit described above is critical, the new cloud security stack provides holistic
benefits to an organization, as well. These include increased focus on strategic initiatives
by establishing a proactive security posture, supporting rapid development processes, and
maintaining regulatory compliance for GDPR, PCI-DSS, and other regulations.
{ }
With a cloud security stack in place, organizations
can move forward with confidence, knowing they are
prepared for the future of work.
To be truly secure, organizations need to move beyond reactive measures in favor of proactive
solutions that can meet a diverse set of threats. Fortunately, a trusted security advisor can
help organizations navigate the creation and implementation of holistic security solutions that
effectively meet their needs.
After all, security helps safeguard your hard-won opportunities, protecting the trust you’ve
earned. By applying a new cloud security stack, along with expert advice, organizations can
confidently meet the security needs of the business and customers alike.
Learn more about GlobalDots and their approach to navigating the cloud security stack.
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Cloud Security: Don’t just fortify your organization, amplify your critical workflows and
employee freedoms within their realms of permission.
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