Overview
Cloud security solutions are software tools that secure cloud architectures and identities, identify and remediate vulnerabilities, prevent threats, and help respond to incidents when they occur. Data privacy and security concerns continue to grow as more and more businesses adopt cloud infrastructure, and use cloud resources to store sensitive data and run mission-critical applications. With so many security threats facing cloud environments, businesses need to automatically detect security incidents and proactively identify threats across their environment. Cloud security is an evolving challenge that can only be addressed if cloud technologies and security tools work together.
What Do You Need to Secure in the Cloud?
Cloud environments are complex and built of a large number of moving parts. Many organizations use SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) to govern security for their SaaS cloud services, enabling their DevOps, Security and IT teams to get visibility and manage the security posture of their SaaS environments — particularly to evaluate their zero trust initiatives and toolsets. Here are the main types of assets that must be addressed by cloud security solutions:
Cloud networks
Firewalls are as important in the cloud as they are on-premises, but they involve a few different requirements. A cloud firewall must be deployed in such a way that it does not disrupt essential connections within a virtual private cloud (VPC) or within the broader cloud network. Firewalls and other technologies can be used to inspect and filter network traffic to and from cloud resources (ingress/egress traffic) — whether web access in front of an application or general traffic regulation.
Compute instances
Also known as virtual machines (VMs), these are computing resources that run cloud workloads. A compute instance must be protected against vulnerabilities, malware, and uncontrolled changes, like any server. Protection can be more complex because cloud instances are started and stopped dynamically. They must remain visible to IT administrators and each instance must be governed by a security policy.
Containers
A common deployment pattern in the cloud is to run applications in containers: lightweight processes that can contain an entire software environment. Containers are used to run software reliably in any environment.
Containers are based on images, and security solutions must provide a way to scan container images for vulnerabilities or unauthorized changes before and as they are used. In addition, there is a need for monitoring and protection of containers during runtime, and additional security layers for container orchestrators, like Kubernetes.
Cloud applications
Cloud applications, whether deployed on cloud instances, containers, or serverless platforms, require their own security measures. This includes securing application configuration, ensuring strong authentication, and monitoring application traffic for malicious or abnormal patterns. Both their logs and their authentication methodologies should be secure. IT administrators and security teams must have central visibility and control over cloud applications, to enable threat detection and response.
How Are Cloud Security Solutions Impacted by Governance and Compliance?
A cloud security solution should support the standards and regulations affecting your organization, and assist with compliance.
Regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and standards like the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), have extensive implications for cloud environments. Ideally, a cloud security solution should help organizations:
- Identify elements in the environment that may violate a compliance requirement
- Remediate compliance issues
- Collect relevant data from the environment such as access and change logs
- Generate reports demonstrating compliance to auditors