As organizations move their operations to the cloud, they face a difficult challenge in ensuring secure configurations and consistent security posture across multiple cloud services and platforms. In addition, they must do all of this in a way that does not impede their development team – no easy feat.   Despite the fact that many companies are still grappling with these complexities, the cloud still presents considerable advantages that make the struggles worthwhile.

Public cloud infrastructures allow developers to build their applications with microservices architectures that can be spun up and spun down as needed, which brings great flexibility and cost efficiencies. A recent ESG study found more than 40% of organizations are running their applications on public cloud infrastructure, expected to double within the next two years.

Cloud Native Applications Misconfigurations and Issues

Consequently, with this increasing rate of application development comes a range of misconfigurations and issues.  The top five reported issues associated with misconfigured cloud applications and services within the past year included:

  1. 30% Externally Facing Workloads
  2. 27% Overly Permissive User Accounts
  3. 23% Misconfigured Security Groups
  4. 22% Overly Permissive Service Accounts
  5. 22% Unprotected Cloud Secrets

How Can Organizations Can Refine Their Cloud Security

With nearly every application having at least one vulnerability or misconfiguration that affects security, a quarter of which are critically severe, it is hard to know where to start.  Based on a recent study conducted by ESG, we have compiled five primary areas that organizations should focus on as they strive to refine their cloud strategy through 2024.

  1. Get buy-in from your developers

Simply put, if your security solution impedes the way in which your developers are working, they will not use it.  Depending on organizational structure and cloud adoption, security responsibility typically falls within one group with 31% leaning on a dedicated cyber security team and 20% relying on IT operations.  However, in terms of the implementation and operation of cyber security controls, multiple groups are involved. DevOps jumps to 45%, just behind the cyber security team (56%) when it comes to day-to-day usage. There is a huge opportunity for finding a solution that helps these teams to collaborate better with visibility of roles and policies to streamline efforts and reduce duplication.

  1. Integrate security processes and controls via DevOps processes

There is a growing effort to incorporate security tools into development practices, specifically the controls around the tools that manage the SDLC, including CI/CD stages.  Currently, more than half (57%) of organizations report having incorporated security into DevOps processes to some extent.  Additionally, 47% found the most effective step taken to improve their security posture of cloud native applications was using IAC templates and third party solutions in order to identify and correct misconfigurations before deploying new code to production.

  1. Use CSPM to deal with scale

One of the biggest cloud security challenge is trying to maintain security consistency across an organization’s data center and public cloud environments.  While most organizations take advantage of CSP security features and capabilities in order to best leverage the architecture of that cloud platform, an overwhelming 46% utilize a third party CSPM solution. Using a neutral CSPM offering allows them to manage applications across multiple cloud environments to drive consistency across the platforms.  This integrated dashboard provides a unified view to best assess risk. Top business drivers for using CSPM include, addressing the sheer number of assets that are cloud resident, preparing for security incidents and meeting best practices for the configuration of cloud-resident workloads and the use of APIs.

  1. Do not overlook entitlements when defining roles, access and permissions

In terms of managing cloud entitlements, most organizations believe they understand user roles and permissions, including knowing who can change a record or an element’s configuration.  They are most worried about the ease of over provisioning access and managing access to reduce risk.  One feature that can help scale with the right amount of visibility and control is cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM).  The vast majority of organizations recognize CIEM as critical (20%) or very important (69%) in reducing security risk and are likely (54%) to remove excessive, unneeded and unused permissions and entitlements using auto-remediation capabilities.

  1. Consolidate to a CNAPP way of thinking

As organizations have graduated throughout the various stages of cloud security they have collected a catalog of different solutions, and are now looking to consolidate to a platform that can tie crucial pieces like CSPM, CIEM, intelligence and more into developer and application security. CNAPP connects everything together, which reduces the number of misconfigurations and increases efficiencies allowing security to coordinate with development for faster remediation. In fact, 84% plan to invest in a CNAPP with strong CSPM capabilities.

Complete Unified Cloud Native Security Platform

It’s clear, security teams are looking for newer, more efficient ways to drive actions that reduce security risk.  By keeping these five key areas in mind, including trimming excessive access permissions and fixing coding issues that make them vulnerable to attack, organizations can maximize their security posture with a fixed level of investment .  From one unified platform, you can visualize and assess security posture, detect misconfigurations, model and enforce gold standard policies, protect against attacks and insider threats, and comply with regulatory requirements and best practices.

From code to cloud, Check Point’s CloudGuard CNAPP unifies cloud security with deeper security insights to prioritize risks and prevent critical attacks — providing more context, smarter security, faster.  Only CloudGuard’s CNAPP provides broad coverage and actionable outputs for security teams by taking all of the security and contextual factors into account, and generating prioritized remediation to focus security resources only on the 1% of alerts that comprise 100% of the business’ risks.  Learn more.

You may also like