The cloud offers critical tools that enable companies to maintain a competitive edge, increase business efficiency, and enhance customer experience. However, these benefits come with significant security implications that require organizations to reassess their security strategies to accommodate the complexity of multi-cloud environments effectively.
The security environment has become increasingly complex due to the interweaving of on-premises, public, and multiple clouds, resulting in a dynamic and elastic environment for workloads. This complexity poses a challenge for security teams as legacy security tools, designed for the traditional IT environment, primarily focus on static indicators like IP addresses, ports, and payloads and are not equipped to provide visibility and enforcement into the complexity of the cloud.
Cloud builders and security teams often face blind spots and security challenges when it comes to infrastructure, network resources, applications, and workload behaviors. In addition, associated security risks such as CI/CD pipeline vulnerabilities, workload vulnerabilities (containers/ Kubernetes, Virtual Machines, IaC templates, etc.), misconfiguration, and excessive permissions/ entitlements within and among the clouds exacerbate the challenges. Organizations may use advanced technologies such as EDR, TDR, or XDR, but these technologies only provide capabilities to detect risks at the cloud workload level, not at the infrastructure and control plane level. This makes it difficult for DevOps and security teams to understand the context of the cloud they are engaging in, making it challenging to assess their security posture for data and workloads in the cloud.
As organizations operate in multi-cloud environments, they face a shortage of skilled manpower, leading to increasing alert fatigue and operational overload among their security teams. This dynamic and fast-paced nature of the cloud makes it challenging for security teams to gain real-time insights and respond promptly to critical threats. To address these challenges, organizations need to reassess their security strategies and tools. It’s crucial to provide visibility and eliminate blind spots in the cloud, which helps maintain a competitive edge and protect sensitive data. By doing so, companies can respond to threats promptly and efficiently, ensuring their security posture is always robust.
To achieve this, organizations should invest in cloud-native security tools that provide visibility into all areas of the cloud infrastructure, network resources, application and workload behaviors, and associated security risks. This will allow security teams to have real-time actionable insights, enabling them to detect and mitigate security risks promptly and effectively.
Additionally, organizations should adopt a proactive security approach by incorporating security considerations early in their cloud journey. This approach will ensure that security is a priority from the onset and will minimize the technical debts and the need for reactive measures that often lead to increased risks.
Cloud Detection & Response for comprehensive cloud visibility and better risk prioritization and management.
The risks associated with cloud environments are constantly changing, making it essential for organizations to have a cloud-native security solution that can provide comprehensive visibility into their cloud environments. This visibility helps security teams understand the entire risk picture and prioritize risks based on context. Risk prioritization is crucial for cloud security teams and DevOps engineers to effectively allocate limited resources, meet compliance requirements, protect critical assets, and mitigate the potential impact of successful attacks.
To address these challenges, many organizations have adopted cloud detection and response (CDR) as one of the most effective ways to gain visibility and prioritize risks in the cloud environment. CDR aggregates normalizes, and analyzes large volumes of data about cloud accounts, resources, privileges, configurations, vulnerabilities, and behaviors/activities of workloads and identities. By providing full visibility across different cloud layers, CDR can help filter out noise, eliminate false positives and determine the most critical risks.
Large financial services firms, such as Principal Financial Group, Zions Bancorporation, Western Union, Wells Fargo, and US Bank Corporation have recently migrated to the cloud to modernize their infrastructure and applications as part of their digital transformation journey. Most of their key applications and transaction services will be migrated, developed, and processed in the cloud, which requires them to pay special attention to security and risk management to protect their infrastructure, workloads, and users’ data. As a result, over the last few months, Wells Fargo, US Bank Corporation, and Zions Bancorporation have started to hire many security officers to take care of their cloud risk management. To protect and manage risks for approximately 500 Amazon EC2 instances and more than 100 S3 and huge amounts of data, Western Union used both Check Point CloudGuard and AWS security services.
Check Point has recently introduced the Effective Risk Management (ERM) engine as part of its CloudGuard Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP). The new ERM engine uses contextual artificial intelligence and risk-scoring to eliminate misconfigurations, overprivileged access, and other vulnerabilities to help security teams prioritize risks and provides actionable remediation guidance based on workload posture, identity permissions, attack path analysis, and an application’s business value.
With the addition of intelligent risk prioritization, agentless scanning, entitlement management, and pipeline security, the ERM engine enables security teams to perform comprehensive threat prevention from code to cloud across the entire application lifecycle with the ability to focus on critical threats. This helps reduce complexity, alert fatigue, and management overheads for better risk management and business outcomes.
Providing clarity and eliminating blind spots in the cloud is crucial to ensure companies can maintain their competitive edge, protect their data, and respond to threats promptly and efficiently. The dynamic and constantly changing nature of cloud environments requires organizations to adopt cloud-native security solutions, prioritize risk management efforts, and use tools like CDR and Check Point’s ERM to gain comprehensive visibility into their cloud environments. By prioritizing risk mitigation efforts, organizations can reduce their attack surface, protect critical assets, and meet compliance requirements while improving their overall risk management posture and DevOps agility.
