Cloud Security: A Necessary Component in Digital Transition Planning

Cloud Security

Buoyed by tailwinds from the pandemic and remote work, cloud adoption is on the rise, and enterprise cloud migrations are expanding from fringe applications and experiments to business-critical initiatives. As such, security capabilities are evolving to allow enterprises to reap the benefits of moving to the cloud while retaining control over their security posture, data protection programs and application integrity. 

Drivers

2020 will go down as a pivotal year for cloud adoption as businesses sought to cut costs, retain flexibility and throttle demand due to dislocation caused by the pandemic. In fact, cloud security is the number one investment area for 2021, according to the Team8 2021 CISO Survey, followed by security automation and identity and access management. In retrospect, we expect that 2020 will be remembered not only as the year when cloud became the default, but also when the dynamics governing enterprise networks and workload deployments changed forever. In a world where containers¹ offer the capability to combine hybrid, multi-cloud and on-premise computing and storage strategies, security tools and techniques will need to evolve to reduce complexity created by a multitude of new offerings within and beyond the enterprise perimeter. For example, workloads moving between different cloud environments to optimize for speed, scalability, cost and compliance have created a new “shared responsibility” model between the enterprise and its different cloud providers. If not managed properly, this model could open the door for threat actors to identify and leverage misconfigurations as a way to gain access.   

Impact 

Cloud is becoming so complex it should be perceived as an operating system. Many of today’s security solutions are just modern-day equivalents of endpoint security and other on-premise techniques that had limited effectiveness. Attacks are not only still happening, they are being amplified by the pervasiveness, speed and connectedness of the cloud. Instead of applying legacy solutions to the cloud, organizations need security solutions that are architected for the cloud, combining control and integrity with scalability and agility. 

Solutions 

Cloud workload protection platform (CWPP), cloud security posture management (CSPM), container security, cloud infrastructure entitlement management, cloud access security broker (CASB), extended detection and response (XDR).

Perspectives:

• Defender’s Perspective – The next big thing with regard to cloud security is automated remediation. Most cloud vulnerabilities can be automatically fixed rather than fixing them one by one, by hand. When you describe things with code, they can be easily applied to multiple instances. This characteristic offers an opportunity to automatically remediate these vulnerabilities as opposed to waiting for DevOps to do it.”  – Jonathan Jaffe, CISO, Lemonade

• Team8’s Attacker Perspective – The complexity of an environment usually plays into the hands of the attacker, and it would be hard to find infrastructure more complex than the modern cloud. It is a mesh of services, identities, logs, networking, compute and storage. For attackers, it’s the Wild West.  

When moving to the cloud, many enterprises lose the visibility, understanding and control they had when their infrastructure was on-premise. This is a new playground for attackers, especially since they have plenty of opportunities for target practice on cloud networks.

In our next blog post, we will cover the Security of Things. The full series can be accessed here.

Authors who have contributed to this blog post:

Bob Blakey, Operating Partner at Team8.

¹A container is a standard unit of software that packages up code and all its dependencies so the application runs quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another.