Cloud Security

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing refers to the process of accessing resources, software and databases over the internet and outside the confines of local hardware restrictions. This technology gives organizations flexibility when scaling their operations by offloading a portion, or majority, of their infrastructure management to third-party hosting providers.

The core of any third-party cloud service involves the provider managing the physical network, data storage, data servers, and computer virtualization frameworks. The service is stored on the provider’s servers and virtualized via their internally managed network to be delivered to clients to be accessed remotely. This offloads hardware and other infrastructure costs to give clients access to their computing needs from anywhere via internet connectivity.

Cloudy Computing Services

The most common and widely adopted cloud computing services are:

IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service): Offers a hybrid approach, which allows organizations to manage some of their data and applications on-premises. At the same time, it relies on cloud providers to manage servers, hardware, networking, virtualization and storage needs.

PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service): Gives organizations the ability to streamline their application development and delivery. It does so by providing a custom application framework that automatically manages operating systems, software updates, storage and supporting infrastructure in the cloud.

SaaS (Software-as-a-Service): Provides cloud-based software hosted online and typically available on a subscription basis. Third-party providers manage all potential technical issues, such as data, middleware, servers and storage. This setup helps minimize IT resource expenditures and streamline maintenance and support functions

Cloud Environments Deployment Models

Cloud environments are deployment models in which one or more cloud services create a system for the end-users and organizations. These segments the management responsibilities — including security — between clients and providers. Types of Cloud Environment

Public Cloud Environments: Are run by cloud service providers. In this environment servers are shared by multiple tenants. These are third-party services run by the provider to give clients access via the web.

Private Cloud Environments: Can be in a customer-owned data center or run by a public cloud service provider. In both instances, servers are single tenant, and organizations don’t have to share space with other companies.

Hybrid Cloud Environments: Are a combination of on-premises data centers and third-party clouds. Consist of using a blend of private third-party cloud and/or onsite private cloud data center with one or more public clouds.

Multi-Cloud Environments: Include two or more cloud services operated by different cloud service providers. include the use of two or more cloud services from separate providers. These can be any blend of public and/or private cloud services

What is Cloud Security?

Cloud security is a discipline of cyber security dedicated to securing cloud computing systems. This includes keeping data private and safe across online-based infrastructure, applications, and platforms. Securing these systems involves the efforts of cloud providers and the clients that use them, whether an individual, small to medium business, or enterprise uses.

Cloud providers host services on their servers through always-on internet connections. Since their business relies on customer trust, cloud security methods are used to keep client data private and safely stored. However, cloud security also partially rests in the client’s hands as well. Understanding both facets is pivotal to a healthy cloud security solution.

Cloud security mainly focuses on how to implement policies, processes, and technologies together so they ensure:

• Data Security / Data Protection
• Identity and access management (IAM)
• Governance (policies on threat prevention, detection, and mitigation)
• Data retention (DR) and business continuity (BC) planning
• Provide Control over Privacy
• Legal compliance

No matter which type of environment or combination of environments an organization uses, cloud security is intended to protect physical networks, including routers and electrical systems, data, data storage, data servers, applications, software, operating systems, and hardware

Cloud service providers (CSPs) typically follow a shared responsibility model, which means implementing cloud computing security is both the responsibility of the cloud provider and you—the customer. Think of it as a responsibility framework that defines which security tasks belong to the cloud provider and which are the duty of the customer. Understanding where your provider’s security responsibilities end and yours begin is critical for building a resilient cloud security strategy.

Broadly speaking, the CSP is always responsible for the cloud and its core infrastructure, while the customer is expected to secure anything that runs “in” the cloud, such as network controls, identity and access management, data, and applications.  Shared responsibility models vary depending on the service provider and the cloud computing service model you use—the more the provider manages, the more they can protect.

More recently, a new model for cloud computing security is emerging which sees shared responsibility models shifting to shared fate models. Under shared fate, a cloud provider provides more comprehensive guidance, resources, and tools to help customers sustain secure use of the cloud, rather than leaving customers to navigate risk management in cloud-native environments.

Why is Cloud Security important?

In modern-day enterprises, there has been a growing transition to cloud-based environments and IaaS, Paas or SaaS computing models. The dynamic nature of infrastructure management, especially in scaling applications and services, can bring a number of challenges to enterprises when adequately resourcing their departments. These as-a-service models give organizations the ability to offload many of the time-consuming, IT-related tasks.

As companies continue to migrate to the cloud, understanding the security requirements for keeping data safe has become critical. While third-party cloud computing providers may take on the management of this infrastructure, the responsibility of data asset security and accountability doesn’t necessarily shift along with it.

By default, most cloud providers follow best security practices and take active steps to protect the integrity of their servers. However, organizations need to make their own considerations when protecting data, applications and workloads running on the cloud.

Security threats have become more advanced as the digital landscape continues to evolve. These threats explicitly target cloud computing providers due to an organization’s overall lack of visibility in data access and movement. Without taking active steps to improve their cloud security, organizations can face significant governance and compliance risks when managing client information, regardless of where it is stored.

Cloud security should be an important topic of discussion regardless of the size of your enterprise. Cloud infrastructure supports nearly all aspects of modern computing in all industries and across multiple verticals. However, successful cloud adoption depends on putting in place adequate countermeasures to defend against modern-day cyberattacks. Regardless of whether your organization operates in a public, private or hybrid cloud environment, cloud security solutions and best practices are a necessity for maintaining business continuity

What are some cloud security challenges?

Lack of visibility: It’s easy to lose track of how your data is accessed and by whom, since many cloud services are accessed outside of corporate networks and through third parties.

Multitenancy: Public cloud environments house multiple client infrastructures under the same umbrella. As a result, it’s possible that your hosted services can get compromised by malicious attackers as collateral damage when targeting other businesses.

Access management and shadow IT: While enterprises may be able to successfully manage and restrict access points across on-premises systems, administering these same levels of restrictions can be challenging in cloud environments. This can be dangerous for organizations that don’t deploy bring-your-own device (BYOD) policies and allow unfiltered access to cloud services from any device or geolocation.

Cloud Compliance and Governance : Regulatory compliance management is oftentimes a source of confusion for enterprises that use public or hybrid cloud deployments. Overall accountability for data privacy and security still rests with the enterprise, and heavy reliance on third-party solutions to manage this component can lead to costly compliance issues.

All the leading cloud providers have aligned themselves with most of the well-known accreditation programs such as PCI 3.2, NIST 800-53, HIPAA and GDPR. However, customers are responsible for ensuring that their workload and data processes are compliant. Given the poor visibility as well as the dynamics of the cloud environment, the compliance audit process becomes close to mission impossible unless tools are used to achieve continuous compliance checks and issue real-time alerts about misconfigurations.

Misconfigurations: A substantial portion of breached records can be attributed to misconfigured assets, making the inadvertent insider a key issue for cloud computing environments. Misconfigurations can include leaving default administrative passwords in place, or not creating appropriate privacy settings.

Increased Attack Surface: The public cloud environment has become a large and highly attractive attack surface for hackers who exploit poorly secured cloud ingress ports in order to access and disrupt workloads and data in the cloud. Malware, Zero-Day, Account Takeover and many other malicious threats have become a day-to-day reality.

Lack of Visibility and Tracking: In the IaaS model, the cloud providers have full control over the infrastructure layer and do not expose it to their customers. The lack of visibility and control is further extended in the PaaS and SaaS cloud models. Cloud customers often cannot effectively identify and quantify their cloud assets or visualize their cloud environmets.

Ever-Changing Workloads: Cloud assets are provisioned and decommissioned dynamically—at scale and at velocity. Traditional security tools are simply incapable of enforcing protection policies in such a flexible and dynamic environment with its ever-changing and ephemeral workloads.

DevOps, DevSecOps and Automation: Organizations that have embraced the highly automated DevOps CI/CD culture must ensure that appropriate security controls are identified and embedded in code and templates early in the development cycle. Security-related changes implemented after a workload has been deployed in production can undermine the organization’s security posture as well as lengthen time to market.

Granular Privilege and Key Management: Often cloud user roles are configured very loosely, granting extensive privileges beyond what is intended or required. One common example is giving database delete or write permissions to untrained users or users who have no business need to delete or add database assets. At the application level, improperly configured keys and privileges expose sessions to security risks. Complex Environments: Managing security in a consistent way in the hybrid and multicloud environments favored by enterprises these days requires methods and tools that work seamlessly across public cloud providers, private cloud providers, and on-premise deployments—including branch office edge protection for geographically distributed organizations

How should you approach cloud security?

The way to approach cloud security is different for every organization and can depend on several variables. However, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has made a list of best practices that can be followed to establish a secure and sustainable cloud computing framework.

The NIST has created necessary steps for every organization to self-assess their security preparedness and apply adequate preventative and recovery security measures to their systems. These principles are built on the NIST’s five pillars of a cybersecurity framework: Identify, protect, detect, respond and recover.

Another emerging technology in cloud security that supports the execution of NIST’s cybersecurity framework is cloud security posture management (CSPM). CSPM solutions are designed to address a common flaw in many cloud environments – misconfigurations. Cloud infrastructures that remain misconfigured by enterprises or even cloud providers can lead to several vulnerabilities that significantly increase an organization’s attack surface. CSPM addresses these issues by helping to organize and deploy the core components of cloud security. These include identity and access management (IAM), regulatory compliance management, traffic monitoring, threat response, risk mitigation and digital asset management

Benefits of cloud security

Although cloud security has often been framed as a barrier to cloud adoption, the reality is that cloud is no more or less secure than on-premises security. In fact, cloud computing security offers many advantages for businesses that can improve your overall security posture.

The top cloud providers have secure-by-design infrastructure and layered security that is built directly into the platform and its services, including everything from zero-trust network architecture to identity and access management to multi-factor authentication, encryption, and continuous logging and monitoring. Plus, the cloud helps you to automate and manage security at an enormous scale.  Other common cloud security benefits include:

Greater visibility: Only an integrated cloud-based security stack is capable of providing the centralized visibility of cloud resources and data that is vital for defending against breaches and other potential threats. Cloud security can provide the tools, technologies, and processes to log, monitor, and analyze events for understanding exactly what’s happening in your cloud environments.

Centralized security: Cloud security allows you to consolidate protection of cloud-based networks for streamlined, continuous monitoring and analysis of numerous devices, endpoints, and systems. It also enables you to centrally manage software updates and policies from one place and even implement and action disaster recovery plans.

Reduced costs: With cloud security, you don’t have to pay for dedicated hardware to upgrade your security or use valuable resources to handle security updates and configurations. CSPs provide advanced security features that allow for automated protection capabilities with little to no human intervention.

Data protection: The best cloud computing providers will provide data security by design, offering strong access controls, encryption for data at rest and in transit, and data loss prevention (DLP) to secure your cloud data wherever it’s located or managed.

Cloud compliance: Cloud providers go to great lengths to comply with both international and industry compliance standards, often undergoing rigorous independent verifications of their security, privacy, and compliance controls. Advanced threat detection: Reputable CSPs also invest in cutting-edge technologies and highly skilled experts to provide real–time global threat intelligence that can detect both known and unknown threats in the wild and in your networks for faster remediation

Advanced threat detection: Reputable CSPs also invest in cutting-edge technologies and highly skilled experts to provide real–time global threat intelligence that can detect both known and unknown threats in the wild and in your networks for faster remediation

Cloud Security Solutions

While cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure (Azure), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offer many cloud native security features and services, supplementary third-party solutions are essential to achieve enterprise-grade cloud workload protection from breaches, data leaks, and targeted attacks in the cloud environment. Only an integrated cloud-native/third-party security stack provides the centralized visibility and policy-based granular control necessary to deliver the following industry best practices:

Identity and access management (IAM): Identity and access management (IAM) tools and services allow enterprises to deploy policy-driven enforcement protocols for all users attempting to access both on-premises and cloud-based services. The core functionality of IAM is to create digital identities for all users so they can be actively monitored and restricted when necessary during all data interactions, allowing you to enforce your policies across your entire organization

Data loss prevention (DLP): DLP can help you gain visibility into the data you store and process by providing capabilities to automatically discover, classify, and de-identify regulated cloud data. DLP services offer a set of tools and services designed to ensure the security of regulated cloud data. DLP solutions use a combination of remediation alerts, data encryption and other preventive measures to protect all stored data, whether at rest or in motion

Security information and event management (SIEM): Security information and event management (SIEM) provides a comprehensive security orchestration solution that automates threat monitoring, detection and response in cloud-based environments. SIEM technology uses artificial intelligence (AI)-driven technologies to correlate log data across multiple platforms and digital assets. This gives IT teams the ability to successfully apply their network security protocols, enabling them to quickly react to any potential threats

Next Generation Firewall : Safeguarding all applications (and especially cloud-native distributed apps) with a next-generation web application firewall This will granularly inspect and control traffic to and from web application servers, automatically updates WAF rules in response to traffic behavior changes, and is deployed closer to microservices that are running workloads

Public key infrastructure (PKI): PKI is the framework used to manage secure, encrypted information exchange using digital certificates. PKI solutions typically provide authentication services for applications and verify that data remains uncompromised and confidential through transport. Cloud-based PKI services allow organizations to manage and deploy digital certificates used for user, device, and service authentication

Enhanced data protection: encryption at all transport layers, secure file shares and communications, continuous compliance risk management, and maintaining good data storage resource hygiene such as detecting misconfigured buckets and terminating orphan resources

Zero Trust Cloud Strategy: Implement a Zero Trust security strategy and use identity and access management to manage and protect access . Threat intelligence that detects and remediates known and unknown threats in real-time. Security controls across logically isolated networks and micro-segments. Deploy business-critical resources and apps in logically isolated sections of the provider’s cloud network, such as Virtual Private Clouds (AWS and Google) or vNET (Azure). Use subnets to micro-segment workloads from each other, with granular security policies at subnet gateways. Use dedicated WAN links in hybrid architectures, and use static user-defined routing configurations to customize access to virtual devices, virtual networks and their gateways, and public IP addresses

Change Management : Enforcement of virtual server protection policies and processes such as change management , software updates, identify and fix configuration errors

Audits : Cloud security vendors provide robust Cloud Security Posture Management, consistently applying governance and compliance rules and templates when provisioning virtual servers, auditing for configuration deviations, and remediating automatically where possible

Cloud Native Application Security : In the DevOps pipeline, shift security left to embed security into the code itself, so cloud-native applications start secure and stay secure. Implement a cloud workload protection platform to build security into the development process.

Training Program : Institute a training program to ensure employees are aware of the latest threats and phishing tactics.

Patch Software Policies : Regularly patch software and institute policies to keep employee devices up to date.

Business continuity and disaster recovery: Regardless of the preventative measures organizations have in place for their on-premises and cloud-based infrastructures, data breaches and disruptive outages can still occur. Enterprises must be able to quickly react to newly discovered vulnerabilities or significant system outages as soon as possible. Disaster recovery solutions are a staple in cloud security and provide organizations with the tools, services and protocols necessary to expedite the recovery of lost data and resume normal business operations