By, Trisha Paine, Head of Cloud Marketing Program
Cloud security raises unique challenges compared to security on premises. Security professionals are now faced with the challenge of securing everything across multiple clouds. On average over 70% of enterprises now use two (2) or more clouds. This requires unique security strategies for various workloads across numerous public and private clouds. Additionally, difficulty obtaining visibility and the lack of end-to-end context further inhibits your ability to provide consistent and continuous security across these clouds.
In this blog, we will outline several key challenges that drive the need for a unified cloud native security platform.
1. Lack of a Holistic View
Log and event data needed for cloud native security is often disconnected, with little to no relationship or context within that data, resulting in an inability to see a holistic view and take action. Security teams often spend an inordinate amount of time piecing data together, and inevitably searching for a needle in a haystack, rather than taking action in response to an incident. Often, security teams must rely on manual processes to stitch together the needed info, such as copying and pasting from one tool to another. By the time they figure out what happened the attacker is long gone. With the speed and sprawl of modern cloud infrastructures compounding this issue, this then becomes an untenable approach to cloud native security.
2. Multiple, Uncooperative Cloud Native Solutions Result in Gaps
The unique challenges of cloud security are only exacerbated by disparate solutions. Multiple solutions that are not tightly coupled generally fail to cooperate and lack shared intelligence or security data. The result is excess complexity and potential security gaps which provide adversaries easy ways to comprise data and workloads in the cloud.
According to The Oracle and KPMG Cloud Threat Report 2020, 70% of those surveyed report too many tools are needed to protect public cloud environments. On average, each uses more than 100 discrete security controls. As a result:
Too much cloud complexity +
Too many different security solutions +
Solutions not cooperating =
No shared intelligence or security data, resulting in gaps, and increased risk.
3. More Cloud Native Security Tools Doesn’t Equal More Security
CISOs have too much technology and too many products, and security engineers are overwhelmed. More tools equals more security IT staff to train, equals more human capital expenditure to stay secure. Most CISOs would rather have everything consolidated. Without consolidated dashboards, it’s very difficult to identify and act on threats in a timely manner.
Check Point commissioned Dimensional Research to survey 400 global security leaders on their attitudes towards tool consolidation. The key findings of this research confirmed:
- 49% of all organizations use between 6 and 40 point security products
- 27% of larger organization use between 11 and 40 different vendors’ products
- 98% of organizations manage their security products with multiple consoles
99% of companies using solutions from multiple security vendors said it caused challenges to their organization. In particular, the inability to get a holistic view of an organization’s threat posture creates visibility silos, which complicates incident response.
As recently published in GCN, asset inventory is an important part of the 4 Essential Pillars of Cloud Security. “A centralized inventory of all cloud-based assets streamlines management overhead, but it’s complex and manually intensive to develop and maintain. The best security solution would automate the entire inventory process.”
Additionally, implementing Zero Trust using disparate technologies may result in inherent security gaps and complexities.
The Benefits of Unified Cloud Native Security
Reducing vendors reduces the gaps and strengthens security. Consolidation also allows for a higher level of security through superior integration, and fewer functional gaps between the protections each product delivers. Additionally, security professionals eliminate the need to monitor multiple management consoles, and only need to be trained to one unified security solution
Bridging the Gap to Achieve Harmonious Cloud Native Security
To overcome these gaps, it is imperative to implement tools and resources to help simplify managing security in the cloud and take back control of security. The challenge is how to get a high level of security, with extensive coverage that is manageable. Ideally, everything should work in concert, together for cloud, networks, mobile, endpoint, IoT, etc.
It’s imperative to automate tedious tasks and eliminate manual updates and rule tuning. You must ensure all of the pieces of the cloud are following best practices. High fidelity posture management with enriched visibility is also vital, to enable you to see your entire infrastructure, how it is protected across different clouds, different workloads and different applications, and automatically remediate issues. You need to be alerted to configurations that might increase risk, and, ideally, be able to automatically remediate. To do that at scale, it needs to be automated.
Check Point CloudGuard’s Cloud Native Security Platform
Check Point CloudGuard’s cloud native security platform is designed for advanced threat prevention, multi-vector cyberattacks targeting enterprise cloud services. You can effectively secure the sprawl with one unified cloud native security platform that automates security posture at scale, preventing advanced threats and giving you visibility and control over all of your workloads, across any cloud.