Shift Left to Overcome the Top 4 Cloud Security Challenges

The cloud is prevalent as it enables enhanced agility, flexibility, and speed. The cloud also helped companies get through the pandemic. However, as businesses continue to migrate and expand their offering across multi-cloud environments, it creates quite a number of challenges.

These challenges range from compliance issues, corporate policy violations, security risks, budget constraints, and more. While all those different variables are important, your priority is cloud data security (both internal and external).

As such, cloud-native companies must go the extra mile to ensure that threat actors don't get access to sensitive data. So, what are the top security challenges for cloud-native companies? What steps can they take to overcome them?

Disparate Buckets of Computing Resources

The cloud makes data accessible from anywhere because of cloud storage services or "buckets." While cloud buckets are supposed to provide added application security, this isn't always the case.

Cloud buckets are virtual storage units partly maintained by the cloud services provider (think of it as a file folder on your computer). Most often, bucket vulnerabilities are the direct result of misconfigurations. After all, buckets are private by default but meant for public use (and you must be careful).

As enterprises operate more in multi-cloud environments, it gets far more complicated. With four out of five organizations leveraging two or more infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or platform-as-a-service (PaaS) providers, the risk is higher than ever before.

Configuring disparate cloud buckets and computing resources with multiple providers increases your risk exposure significantly. For example, if you miss one security-related checkbox, you can kick the door wide open to a massive data breach.

If you're working with the leading cloud services providers, it's vital to properly secure:

• Blob Storage from Microsoft Azure.
• Cloud Storage for Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Simple Storage Service or S3 from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Whether you're using the cloud giants listed above or others, it's crucial to recognize risks to your cloud bucket security and take steps to mitigate them immediately by shifting left.

Shifting security left early in the development cycle leveraging policy-as-code will help enforce best practices programmatically. For example, you can leverage the Magalix Policy Engine to enforce security and governance protocols in a hybrid cloud environment.

Multiple Identity Access Management (IAM) Interfaces

Having multiple IAM interfaces for different cloud and on-premises environments further complicates matters. For example, whenever you don't have complete visibility on a single pane of glass, you risk allowing a threat actor to breach your environment unnoticed.

To mitigate risk, companies must enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA). This approach makes it easier to secure disparate cloud buckets in a multi-cloud environment with low visibility.

Although it isn't foolproof (as seen by the recent SolarWinds security incident), it does make it much harder for a hacker to breach your buckets. As such, companies must add more layers of security such as identity-first zero trust protocols to fortify enterprise infrastructure.

Multiple Software-as-Service (SaaS) Providers

Enterprises are all using multiple SaaS providers and cloud-native apps. This adds yet another layer of complexity and increases your risk exposure. While these SaaS platforms help boost efficiency and productivity, they all don't share the same security posture or security best practices.

The threat has become increasingly challenging to manage because a large number of the planet's workforce is now working from home. Here, they are also free to use unauthorized apps and services to get the job done.

Furthermore, serverless apps come with hundreds of functions out of the box. As these applications mature, maintaining all this data and the services and enabling secure access will be a nightmare.

Although proactive security protocols like MFA and zero trust help, you can never be too careful. As such, it's crucial to make it mandatory for employees to only work within secure enterprise environments. If possible, make sure that they can only connect using enterprise hardware.

Developer Flexibility in Deploying New Servers

Developer flexibility also increases your risk exposure. For example, when developers are allowed to deploy new servers without the standard processes that go with on-premises environments, security teams might be in the dark about all the latest virtual environments.

If the security team is unaware of what the developers are up to, they won't apply all the necessary security protocols to secure it. More often than not, this results in containers, virtual networks, and virtual private clouds that lack proper security provisions.

Bad coding practices can also expose sensitive data to malicious actors. Threat actors can also exploit exposed APIs to initiate distributed remote code execution (RCE) and denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

If your developers are actively using third-party libraries, that could also lead to a data breach. While open-source code, components, and libraries lessen the burden on developers, it's important to try and avoid it because they can come with a whole host of vulnerabilities.

Secure Cloud-Native Environments by Shifting Security Left

Shifting security left helps reduce overall development costs because you don't have to go back to pay your code debt. So, make it a habit to look for common misconfigurations while shifting security left.

When you shift security left, you also help lay the foundation to nurture an organizational security culture. The key benefit here is automation, and you should apply this approach to your continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) protocols.

Often, developers are under pressure to release new applications and updates, making security an afterthought. But by shifting left early, you automate the process in the software supply chain. You can also automate security management across diverse cloud infrastructure to identify and remediate risks through thorough automated security assessments and compliance monitoring.

One way to make this process a lot easier is to programmatically enforce security policies through code. This approach also helps DevOps teams benefit from automation. Whenever companies integrate policy-as-code within their DevOps workflows, they enable continuous deployment for cloud-native applications. You can achieve this with the help of "automated operators" within your cloud infrastructure or Kubernetes cluster that continuously monitor the repositories for changes.

Whenever there's a change, these automated operators will trigger an update. This means that you can ensure exceptional governance levels in all clusters from a single source of truth. It will also help normalize your hybrid cloud environments.

When you enforce policies across multi-cloud environments, you:

• Apply governance standards across Kubernetes clusters.
• Leverage rules that fit your organization's specific requirements.
• Deploy enterprise policy checks across cloud environments.
• Embed security across DevOps workflows.
• Validate infrastructure compliance early.

How Magalix Can Help?

At Magalix, we help companies ensure cloud security and compliance in three simple steps:

1. Leverage policy as code to programmatically enforce security standards.

2. Implement appropriate workflows and playbooks.

3. Create compliance reporting and analytics frameworks.

A centralized playbook will help enforce your policies (both internal and external) across the application development cycle. This approach allows teams to get up to speed with the latest governance and compliance rules and issues. It also helps scale your security protocols across your environment and enforce best practices.

By creating a compliance reporting and analytics framework, you can ensure transparency and visibility. This sustainable framework will also shed light on how and where you need to improve your security posture and fortify your cloud environment.