Securing a rapidly growing quantity -and variety- of cloud workloads cannot scale without automation. Visibility with the necessary end-to-end context is difficult to obtain. Finally, velocity things are changing constantly, from security best practices and regulations, to the cloud resources themselves.

The Challenges of Cloud Security Posture Management

Security pros are faced with the challenge of securing everything across multiple clouds. Of course, it’s impossible to copy and paste security strategies from on-premises to cloud (or even from one cloud to the other). Cloud is no longer one fixed set of parameters that you can easily manage. Its ephemeral for a start and you must secure access, manage identities, and continuously audit and govern accounts, if you want to stay secure.

As cloud sprawl increases, the number of vulnerabilities you must cope with also expands on a daily basis. On top of this, security pros must also keep pace with the ever-increasing velocity of agile software deployment.

Visibility Limitations Hinder Cloud Security Posture Management

Viewed without context, events can be confusing or misleading. While this can result in amusing images, as seen on the subreddit, “Confusing Perspective,” lack of proper perspective can cripple your security efforts.

Cloud security posture management raises new challenges, including the need to look inside the cloud resources and understand runtime behavior of various workloads, such as containers and serverless functions. In order to secure everything across your increasing cloud sprawl, you have to see what is happening.

With increasing sprawl of workloads across multiple public and private clouds, getting control of it all grows ever more difficult. Questions that appear simple can now be difficult to answer, such as:

• How many accounts do we have?

• Did the developers add machines, new functionality, or connect to the outside world?

• Who put that there?

• Is it configured properly?

To complicate things further, it can be difficult to understand where you have sensitive information within your infrastructure, particularly with ever-expanding SaaS stacks. Despite these challenges, such visibility remains vital in order to map to regulatory requirements.

A lack of end to end context around risk throughout the modern application life cycle is all too common. Visibility was a primary issue among respondents to The Oracle and KPMG Cloud Threat Report 2020. Important areas for improving visibility include finding workload configurations that are out of compliance (28%), an audit trail of system-level activity (27%), identifying misconfigured security groups (25%), and detecting external-facing server workloads that don’t route Internet traffic via jump/bastion host (25%).

Visibility Must Include End-to-End Context

This lack of context around risk also limits the ability to make effective security decisions and stop advanced attacks. Context required to make sense of data is necessary in order to identify and prioritize events, and mitigate the damage done by any successful attacks. Forbes Councils Member Albert Zhichun Li states, “Today, organizations have to accept that motivated attackers will find a way in. The real challenge becomes finding an attacker early in what is typically a long process.”

“Despite these efforts, attackers have a firm advantage in that they get practically an unlimited number of attempts to penetrate a network, and all it takes is one instance of security failing for an attack to be successful.”

Visibility should ideally be enhanced by high fidelity, enabling you to access detailed forensics, drill down to see malicious activity against specific assets, and assess the level of exposure.

Keeping Up with the Constant of Change

Security professionals must keep pace with frequent changes to not only the resources within an expanding cloud sprawl, but security best practices and compliance regulations.

Cloud Security Posture Management Requires Automation

It’s important to not only establish a security baseline, but actively enforce it. You must ensure that compliance rule sets and customized policies are built into the development stages as well as carried over to runtime.

Security and compliance teams must enable developers to maintain the speed they’re striving for. Unfortunately, these teams cannot scale alone to control the security and compliance posture of their cloud environment.

Security and compliance protections must follow the same automated path and self-publish. This requires the ability to automatically remediate or act against suggested remediation. This integration is vital to making sure that the deployment is compliant with internal and external rules.

Cloud with Confidence. Check Point CloudGuard

Security Automated Everywhere. 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. Check Point CloudGuard’s cloud native security platform, is designed for advanced threat prevention, multi-vector cyberattacks targeting enterprise cloud services.

Only CloudGuard offers High Fidelity Posture Management (HFPM) to prevent critical cloud security misconfigurations and keep up with evolving security and compliance best practices. CloudGuard delivers Cloud Security Posture Management that automates governance across assets and services including the visualization and assessment of security posture, misconfiguration detection, and enforcement of security best practices and compliance frameworks. Through enriched security context and high fidelity posture management, security teams can detect compliance misconfigurations and violations automatically, and remediates threats and non-compliance- all from one unified platform.