Understand the cloud security landscape of 2024

As technology and data grow at an unprecedented rate, cloud computing has become the best choice for global enterprises to promote growth and innovation. As we rapidly move toward the second quarter of 2024, the Cloud Security Report’s forecasts highlight the challenges of cloud adoption in the cloud security space.

# As technology and data grow at an unprecedented rate, cloud computing has become the best choice for global enterprises to promote growth and innovation. As we rapidly move toward the second quarter of 2024, the Cloud Security Report’s forecasts highlight the challenges of cloud adoption in the cloud security space.

Challenge

Gartner Research predicts a paradigm shift in the adoption of public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings. By 2025, 80% of enterprises are expected to adopt multiple public cloud IaaS solutions, including various Kubernetes (K8s) offerings. The growing reliance on cloud infrastructure raises critical security concerns, which the Cloud Security Alliance is painfully highlighting.

According to the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), only 23% of organizations report having full visibility into their cloud environments. While cloud technology has great potential, a lack of visibility can leave organizations vulnerable to potential threats within their infrastructure. Another issue that further exacerbates cloud visibility issues is duplicate alerts. A staggering 63% of organizations face duplicate security alerts, hindering security teams’ ability to distinguish real threats from the noise.

Using a unified security approach can alleviate the above challenges, but we found that 61% of organizations are using 3 to 6 different tools. The situation has become more difficult to understand, underscoring the urgency of closing gaps in security defense mechanisms.

Clearly defined security defenses minimize manual intervention by security teams and facilitate the need for automated and streamlined processes in operations. Security teams spend the majority of their time on manual tasks related to security alerts, not only hindering the efficient use of resources but also reducing the productivity of teams working to resolve critical security vulnerabilities.

CSA statistics show that only 18% of organizations take more than four days to remediate a critical vulnerability, underscoring the urgency of the issue. This delay leaves the system vulnerable to potential disruption and compromise and highlights the urgent need for action. Additionally, the re-emergence of a vulnerability within a month of remediation highlights the need for proactive teamwork.

According to CSA, ineffective collaboration between security and development teams can inadvertently create defense gaps and increase the risk of exploitation. By facilitating communication between these critical teams, organizations can better strengthen their defenses and mitigate security threats.

Clearly, the cloud security landscape requires a more comprehensive approach to gain visibility into cloud environments. By implementing the best practices described below, organizations can get closer to their goal of building a secure and resilient cloud infrastructure.

Best Practices

This section will dive into the fundamental pillars of cloud security for protecting cloud assets, starting with the following:

Unified Security

One of the major challenges in cloud security adoption is the lack of a unified security framework. The Unified Security Framework consists of tools and processes that collect information from disparate systems and display it uniformly on a single screen.

Compared to traditional security tools, which require their own set of architectures to work and then additional add-ons to collect data, unified security solutions are a better way to get a holistic view of an organization's security posture.

The unified security framework integrates various security processes such as threat intelligence, access control and monitoring capabilities to simplify visibility and management while promoting collaboration between different teams such as IT, security and compliance.

Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA)

Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) adopts a "never trust, always verify" approach. All stages of cloud data communication, regardless of their position in the cloud hierarchy, should be protected by verification mechanisms and adhere to a zero-trust solution.

An effective Zero Trust solution implemented through a cloud architecture should inspect all unencrypted and encrypted traffic before it reaches the required destination and pre-verify the identity of the access request to the requested data and the requested Content.

Adaptive custom access control policies should be implemented that not only change context based on the attack surface, but also eliminate the risk of any erroneous movements that compromise device functionality.

By adopting the Zero Trust practices described above, organizations can implement strong identity and access management (IAM) to provide granular protection for applications, data, networks, and infrastructure.

Encryption Everywhere

Data encryption is a major challenge for many organizations and can be mitigated by encrypting data at rest and in transit. Encryption-as-a-service solutions can be implemented that provide centralized encryption management for authorizing traffic across data clouds and hubs.

All application data can be encrypted through a centralized encryption process to ensure the security of sensitive information. Data will be governed by identity-based policies, ensuring cluster communications are authenticated and services are authenticated based on trusted authority.

Additionally, encrypting data at all layers of your cloud infrastructure, including applications, databases, and storage, can increase the overall consistency and automation of cloud security. Automated tools can streamline the encryption process while making it easier to apply encryption policies consistently across your entire infrastructure.

Continuous Security Compliance Monitoring

Continuous security compliance monitoring is another important pillar in strengthening the cloud security landscape. Organizations that specialize in healthcare (in compliance with HIPAA regulations) and payments (in compliance with PCI DSS guidelines) need to conduct a rigorous evaluation of infrastructure and processes to protect sensitive information.

To comply with these regulations, continuous compliance monitoring can be leveraged to automatically and continuously scan the cloud infrastructure for compliance gaps. The solution can analyze logs and configurations for security risks by leveraging the concept of “compliance as code”, where security considerations are embedded into every stage of the software development life cycle (SDLC).

By implementing these simplified automated compliance checks and incorporating them into every stage of development, organizations can comply with regulatory requirements while maintaining the agility of cloud software delivery.

Conclusion

In summary, achieving strong cloud security requires a unified security approach with a zero-trust architecture through continuous encryption and compliance monitoring. By adopting these best practices, organizations can strengthen their defenses against evolving cyber threats, protect sensitive data, and build trust with customers and stakeholders.

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