As more businesses move to the cloud to access enterprise-class systems, the IT staff is worried about compliance and security of business processes and data in the cloud.
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) refers to a new approach and collection of security measures to protect cloud infrastructure. Here are five best practices you may follow to implement cloud security posture management.
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Identify Risks Related to Interconnected Objects.
Cloud services consist of several configurations and silos, which make security management a big challenge. You need to understand the relationship between cloud objects and learn more about how they work to understand and identify risks associated with them.
A simple configuration might seem correct to you when you see it as a standalone object. However, the basic configurations can start a chain of complex violations when you navigate relationships between multiple cloud objects.
CSPM tools can monitor the traffic and permissions of interconnected objects and identify any abnormal traffic or activity by these objects. In case of security risk, it can send alerts to IT staff that can intervene and fix the security loophole by making the right changes in the configuration.
Automate Compliance With Cloud Security Standards
Compliance and security auditing procedures designed for on-premise systems are not effective in cloud environments. Organizations need to understand the complex relationship between different cloud objects and their dynamic nature before compliance and security measures assessment.
In a multi-cloud environment, the rules’ benchmark can only be applied to a specific cloud platform and service type. For optimal security, the CSPM tools should continuously monitor the cloud environment and ensure the Center for Internet Security benchmarks are always achieved.
The cloud security tools should also meet industry-specific regulatory compliance requirements fixed by frameworks like PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, SOC, and NIST 800-171. The CSPM solution should automate benchmarking against multiple compliance frameworks.
The security procedures and tools should provide real-time visibility in the audit of the cloud infrastructure whenever the need arises. If there are any deviations from compliance, the security tools should generate alerts that will draw the attention of the IT staff for remedial action.
Besides allowing organizations to meet the industry compliance requirements, the CSPM tools can help you learn more and create benchmarks to meet organizational internal compliance needs.
Prioritize Security Violations by Measuring Risks.
The cloud environment has hundreds of inbound and outbound nodes, and there can be several security violations due to one misconfiguration. According to experts, the number of security alerts and violations the security tools provide can be overwhelming. It would help if you learned more about identifying false positives and isolating critical violations that pose a higher risk.
The CSPM tools give the IT staff ability to measure risks and prioritize violations from the sea of findings. The violations can be classified as “Low risk,” Medium risk, and “High risk.” With CSPM, the IT staff can ensure they do not miss any blind spots that could cause significant repercussions.
Centralize Cloud Visibility in a Multi-Cloud Environment
Today it is common for businesses to use multiple cloud vendors to distribute computing resources and minimize the risk of downtime. Customers need to have separate accounts for development, experimentation, staging, logging data, production, and billing.
Cloud security posture management tools make multi-cloud user management easy. It allows organizations to use a master-level account to implement appropriate access and security policies across all linked accounts in a multi-cloud environment.
It enables the IT staff to group users based on business activity, application types, and team ownership, and parent business units. The CSPM allows organizations to identify sub-groups that pose a higher security risk to the organization. The CSPM tools provide visibility into all cloud assets of the organization through a unified console and understand the relationships between each group and assign risk values accordingly.
Distribute Cloud Security Responsibilities
Many organizations have a misunderstanding that cloud security is the responsibility of the cloud service provider. While the service provider is responsible for providing a secure environment to your business applications and data, the organizations are also responsible for the security of cloud elements that are part of their business operations.
According to experts, all stakeholders should understand where the security division lies between cloud provider and customer to prevent confusion. The cloud service provider will be responsible for the security of the operating systems and the virtualization layers. The customer is responsible for the security of application software, guest operating system, and cloud services configuration.
To sum up, cloud platforms’ dynamic and flexible nature makes them powerful but hard to secure. Cloud security posture management enables organizations to automate the security of the platforms without affecting or limiting the scalability and efficiency.
