Cloud security posture management to minimize breach risks

The proliferation of cloud has been rapid, unavoidable, and is causing massive disruptions in IT operations. The benefits have been remarkable. Cloud is scalable, cost-effective, and can enable tremendous computing capacities based on business needs. It is reliable and offers a secure environment, sometimes even better than on-premise data centers. However, it has a perineal problem of not being able to control public cloud use. Most cloud strategies fall behind due to the inability to regulate unauthorized use of public cloud leading to unnecessary exposure to risks.

As per Gartner, by 2025, 90% of the organizations failing to control public cloud usage might end up inappropriately sharing sensitive data. Underestimating cloud security risks poses a grave danger, and breaches can be embarrassing. To minimize the number of unmanaged risks, enterprises must leverage the Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) approach. There are multiple security configuration parameters to secure applications in the cloud. Most of the breaches happen due to misconfigurations. The answer is CSPM, which can help monitor and protect data while complying with frameworks such as HIPAA, SOC2, or CIS.It includes risk assessment and management, data & privacy compliance, enabling security using DevSecOps, proactive threat discovery, and incident management.

CSPM helps identify unwanted account permissions, unprotected data, security risks in critical accounts, identify slack in encryption key management, and improper configurations in networks. It can fix identity access issues, maintain compliance enable classification of asset inventory, and integrate security into DevOps processes.

CSPM Highlights

• Effectively manage security by identifying developers' responsibilities and which team would develop/modify/update applications & security services. This division of work can quickly help in minimizing risks and manage the time required for any deployments.
• Improve cloud visibility across assets to uncover unknown risks across applications and categorize cloud usage based on business use.
• Automates compliance testing & can leverage CIS (Center for Internet Security) & compliance standards to monitor cloud security posture continuously.
• Identify configuration violations across cloud objects and prevents exposure of data/applications by tuning access policies.
• Categorization of risks to estimate possible violation levels and sort them based on risk levels.
• Customized security controls and operational processes to mitigate high risks posed due to security violations.
• Automated security guard rails for secure cloud deployments and discreet governance.
• Find misconfigurations in the development pipeline and implement remediation measures. Ensure security policy updates based on pipeline feedback on any security breaches.
• Enhanced visibility into cloud operations and secure data stored and processed in cloud environments by proactive threat discovery & response through SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response), effective incident management by using SIEM, security analytics for anomaly detection, Cyber Defense Center for effective intel management, and ML-powered attack prevention & quarantine for endpoint detection & response.
• Build & institutionalize an incident response and recovery plan to take on specific incidents, investigate breaches, analyze events, evaluate security analyst skills, and ensure business continuity.
• DevSecOps to entrench security checks and controls early into the development process & streamline & automate security operations across development teams.

Experience CSPM benefits

A comprehensive CSPM suite can reliably meet access governance, data protection & application security needs across the enterprise.

The features include:

• Scalable cloud-native architecture and features a streamlined cloud management UI for rapid user onboarding.
• Ensure rapid provisioning of secure connectivity to the internet, cloud, and data center applications for remote and mobile users through a next-gen security platform for remote network security. Predefined best security profiles & SSL decryption policies to secure online traffic.
• 24x7 visibility, security, and compliance monitoring across multi-cloud environments. Secure workloads in heterogeneous cloud estates and offer cloud-native application security controls for public cloud platforms, hosts, containers, and serverless technologies to enable microservices to build and deliver applications rapidly.
• ML- driven tools for data correlation and risk assessment across deployments.
• Cloud access security broker services to enable SaaS applications and capabilities such as risk discovery, access control, data loss prevention, data governance, user behavior analysis, and advanced threat prevention to reduce risks of complex threats such as malware and ransomware.

• Virtualized next-generation firewall to monitor private and public cloud environments, including AWS, GCP, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and VMware NSX. The firewall can meet the growing security needs across virtualization use cases, private and public cloud computing environments.

The CSPM Leverage

A robust CSPM solution is an ideal answer to overcome the challenges that arise while managing security and compliance for the rapid build & deployment of global-scale applications. Traditional security tools cannot meet the security demands of a dynamic cloud environment. Its risk visibility is fragmented and becomes a burden while managing the security needs of massive multi-cloud environments. On the other hand, a CSPM solution can dynamically secure cloud resources and sensitive data and subsequently detects threats. The solution has the right mix of rule-based security policies and industry-leading machine learning to detect threats.

You can experience frictionless deployment with no requirement of agents or proxies. The UI is easily navigable and provides a single console for easy comprehension and management of risks across your cloud estate. CSPM solutions can ensure proactive security posture assessment and remove blind spots/risks, even before hackers can exploit them. The solution can prevent threats by correlation of threat intel from third-party sources and expedite security investigations by context-based visual threat maps to prioritize risks and speed up incident response. You can also be sure that your application code is secure without slowing down CI/CD pipeline by code security scans during pre-deployment phases.

CSPM is a comprehensive suite of security services that can secure public cloud environments, remote access of internet and SaaS applications through a cloud-delivered architecture. By leveraging these services, you can envisage, prevent, detect & automatically respond to risks and compliance issues without any discord for users, developers, and administrators.

Cloud security posture management is critical in addressing cloud security risks. To know more about how Aujas can help you enhance your cloud security posture, please do email us at contact@aujas.com.