The cloud has emerged as the primary infrastructure backbone for most enterprises, providing a scalable, flexible, reliable, and customizable platform for the delivery of mission-critical applications. As a result, it has become the leading foundation of server architecture for both new and established businesses. With the rapid growth of hybrid and multi-cloud environments in the enterprise world, organizations have been able to achieve an elastic, agile infrastructure that can accommodate highly dynamic growth, all while saving money. However, this growth has also brought security concerns, and sometimes, organizations can prioritize functionality and features over security. This can be viewed as a hindrance to potential growth, but the increase in security events on applications, services, and data stored in the cloud means that companies that do not build security into their infrastructure from the beginning can be exposing themselves to unnecessary risk.

The Top Challenges for Secure Cloud Migrations

To address these security concerns, Check Point has worked closely with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide enhanced security offerings such as CNAPP, advanced threat prevention, application security, and threat intelligence, all available on AWS Marketplace. Despite this, many organizations can still face security challenges when migrating to the cloud, and proper planning is crucial.

Misconfigurations

Misconfigurations are a key concern for almost 60% companies, according to Cybersecurity Insiders’ 2023 Cloud Security Report. Failure to secure interfaces and misalignment with the principle of least privilege can result in misconfigurations that have the potential to leave organizations vulnerable to data breaches, non-compliance, large fines, and reputational damage. Unfortunately, without a clear migration strategy, enterprises often focus on minimizing services and effort, rather than configuring security policies consistently.

Visibility

Gaining visibility into all environments is another challenge, and it is critical for identifying dark data, managing access control, and handling data privacy. However, cross-platform collaboration and technical complexities can make visibility difficult. Accessing risk before a migration can help avoid major impacts on availability, integrity, and confidentiality, all of which are security-related issues.

Risk

If an organization doesn’t identify and manage its risks, it can incur significant costs and damage. As security events become more prevalent and expensive, the potential price tag of a cybersecurity incident continues to grow. In 2023, IBM reported that the average cost of a data breach is $4.45 million. In addition to the cost of the breach itself, it can also cause significant harm to an organization’s customers, reputation, and productivity.

Advanced threats

Protecting network traffic and preventing advanced network threats is another critical challenge. Businesses migrating to the cloud need to be able to control their own data and keep it private, protect themselves from cyber threats, and securely connect their cloud with their traditional on-premises network, all while maintaining compliance with regulatory mandates. Cloud-based environments are equally as susceptible to malware and bots as traditional environments.

Data security

Data is everywhere—especially in the cloud. With employees, managers, contractors, and third parties making data available in more places, security issues abound: shadow backups, risky data flows, unmanaged databases, overly broad permissions, and more. If your organization has valuable data—and especially if it’s subject to PII or financial regulations—these risks must be addressed.

Applications

Cloud-based applications are also multiplying as more customers transition to the cloud, potentially exposing new attack vectors and security vulnerabilities. For example, more than half of the world’s websites were affected by the Log4j issue (also called Log4Shell) in early 2022, as a security gap in a ubiquitous open-source logging program served as a backdoor into millions of organizations and their cloud-based environments.

Security issues in code

When organizations move to the cloud, DevSecOps teams are often responsible for identifying and addressing security issues, corporate compliance, and best practices for each layer and component. When workloads and applications go live, they must remain protected against threats. Therefore, managing, controlling, and enabling DevSecOps is another critical challenge that organizations must face when migrating to the cloud.

Top 8 Solutions for Addressing Cloud Migration Security Challenges

As organizations continue to migrate their workloads from on-premises to private, public, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, ensuring the security of their assets becomes increasingly important. AWS provides several migration strategies to assist organizations in their move to the cloud. Lack of an organization’s attention to security can cause companies to view it as an inhibitor to cloud migration, leading them to keep sensitive workloads in traditional data centers, even though moving them to the cloud could improve performance and reduce costs.

To help address these concerns, Check Point has developed a comprehensive set of security offerings that enhance AWS functionality and enable digital transformation. By combining AWS-native tools with Check Point CloudGuard, a unified security management platform, businesses can maintain high security standards and avoid potential breaches.

Misconfiguration mitigation

One significant cloud security challenge that organizations face is misconfigurations. Check Point’s CloudGuard CNAPP can detect, prevent, and remediate misconfigurations and security policy inconsistencies, working across AWS, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments to ensure continuous compliance.

Gaining visibility

In a dynamic cloud environment, asset and workload visibility can also be challenging. CloudGuard’s dashboard enables visibility across AWS and hybrid/on-premises environments and runs queries to assess the configuration of the cloud environment. Check Point’s agentless workload posture (AWP) functionality is flexible and agentless, providing deep visibility into an organization’s cloud workloads—without impacting performance.

Enterprise risk management

A strategic approach to enterprise risk management (ERM) can reduce the costs associated with breaches by enabling an organization to take proactive steps to manage and mitigate these risks. An enterprise risk management framework should lay out processes, procedures, and tools for managing risk at the enterprise level. Usability, integration, and regulatory alignment are key criteria when choosing an ERM solution.

Advanced threat prevention

For comprehensive network traffic protection and advanced threat prevention, experts recommend solutions that provide both North-South and East-West protection of cloud assets, as well as a unified management console for consistent policy application everywhere. CloudGuard Network Security provides this level of protection and control, with an industry-leading cloud security gateway and unified security management.

Data security posture management

Integrating with Amazon Macie, CloudGuard CNAPP provides solutions to address data security issues. Amazon Macie helps organizations in automatically discovering, classifying, and safeguarding sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information (PII), financial information, intellectual property, and other sensitive content stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. This data security posture management (DSPM) functionality is enhanced by CloudGuard’s integration, which provides risk scoring functionality to help DSPM be more efficient and effective.

Application security and contextual AI

In the modern age, businesses are building and porting applications to cloud environments, resulting in a proliferation of web functionality and APIs. However, traditional web application firewalls (WAFs) are unable to keep pace with these needs, leading to frequent false positives and heavily customized rulesets. To address this challenge, implementing context-based artificial intelligence (AI) is considered best practice, as it requires only a fraction of the administrative effort and minimizes false positives. One such solution is CloudGuard, which uses contextual AI to detect and prevent threats with unparalleled precision, without any human intervention as applications are updated. By automating security orchestration, CloudGuard offers consistent protection across organizations’ AWS environments.

Serverless and container security

For organizations utilizing the latest AWS Lambda, serverless, and container technologies, enforcing least-privileged access rights, real-time threat detection and blocking, and ensuring container integrity are vital best practices. By implementing automation, security can be built into functionality from the outset, enabling faster development without compromising security. CloudGuard provides workload and container security enhancements that streamline DevSecOps, delivering end-to-end protection from CI/CD to runtime.

Plan and manage secure migration

When migrating to the cloud, prioritizing security is fundamental to success. Effective planning and management, along with implementing solutions that support expert recommendations and best practices, are essential. CloudGuard offers security solutions that complement existing AWS security functionality, empowering customers to migrate with confidence. It can be deployed within minutes from the AWS Marketplace.

Whether repairing security settings proactively, defending against advanced threats, or protecting against zero-day exploits, Check Point and AWS simplify the process of securely migrating workloads to the cloud. Making security an enabler within your organization is key. Sign up for a free consultation with CloudGuard experts to secure your cloud workloads with confidence, everywhere.

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