Preventing Threats and Risk in Cloud Environment

An industry report shares that approximately 80% of companies surveyed had experienced at least one cloud data breach in the last one and a half years. These breaches were the result of misconfiguration of cloud security controls and inadequate visibility into the organization’s cloud security posture in terms of risk, threat and vulnerabilities.

Enterprise security usually takes a backseat while organizations are planning for their cloud journey as typically migration of workloads to cloud starts first, and security is thought about afterwards. Security should go hand-in-hand with the cloud journey and migration strategy to ensure cloud is secured at the perimeter, middle and end layer; while data is also secured at all touch points at rest and/or in transit.

With more and more organizations modernizing their Infrastructure and moving their obsolete servers and apps to the cloud, the use of Kubernetes is on rise. Zensar strongly recommends securing Kubernetes pods using a Kubernetes WAF solution, as a native solution is not enough to keep your data secure from ever changing and evolving malicious threat actors.

As they migrate to cloud, organizations will benefit from faster time to market, cost savings, etc., however their security challenges will increase as the incumbent users who were insiders turn into outsiders.  IT administrators and malicious actors now have identical access to publicly hosted workloads using standard connection methods, protocols and public APIs. As a result, identity has become a new perimeter, and Zero Trust access and automated response is imperative for securing your cloud infrastructure.

A defense in depth (DiD) approach with security controls including DDoS prevention, next-gen firewall, IDS/IPS, web content filtering, WAF, anti-malware, encryption at rest and in transit, etc. still hold their value as was the case in traditional data centers and they are a necessity even now. However, now there is also the need to develop a sound vulnerability and cloud security posture management program.

Most organizations today are using SaaS based applications which provide benefits from the efforts and cost needed for administration, maintenance and development of applications developed in-house. Organizations still struggle to safeguard themselves from threats and risks such as ransomware attacks, data exfiltration, limited visibility over sanctioned and unsanctioned IT, and anomalous user behaviours. Zensar advises using a cloud access security broker (CASB) solution to overcome these challenges.

As our team of security experts observes the increase in sophisticated attacks targeting business critical information, our recommendation to clients includes having advanced and enhanced levels of granular cloud security framework, which provides a 360-degree view of all cloud security aspects. To overcome these challenges and concerns, Zensar offers comprehensive cloud security coverage based on its CloudSecure framework. This framework is guided by our 3C’s principles of Comply, Control and Contain which enables mapping of security controls as follows:

·        Comply – Includes configuration hardening, cloud compliance and policy management

·        Control – Includes authentication, access control, MFA, data discovery, asset and data classification, encryption and key management

·        Contain – Includes vulnerability management, perimeter and endpoint security controls, monitoring and analytics

 

If your organization is moving towards migrating to the cloud, or you are doubting the security of your existing cloud infrastructure to combat today’s growing digital threats, it is time to think about a transformation strategy including cloud security solutions based on Zensar’s CloudSecure framework.