Public cloud brings tremendous advantages to enterprise IT teams, including significant flexibility and agility, along with economies of scale. It allows the organization to set up the required infrastructure much faster than on-premises and provides unmatched business scalability and extra security capabilities. The benefits of agility and efficiency come with the challenge of securing assets and workloads in the cloud. The rapid adoption of public clouds—AWS, Azure, GCP—and an increasing number of cloud services, has created an explosion of data and identity complexity with unmanaged risk.
Despite high-profile data breach incidents, the disciplined use of the public cloud is secure. The secret to adequate public cloud security is improving the overall security posture. Secure posture has an inverse relationship with cybersecurity risk; as security posture improves, risk decreases. Cloud infrastructures are constantly changing; enterprises need to continuously monitor multicloud environments and identify gaps between stated security policies and actual security posture. Proper security not only reduces the possibility of a data breach, but it also minimizes the damage if an attack was successful in gaining access to your cloud environment.
When a major organization has a security breach, it always hits the headlines. Security breach examples include the following:
The Capital One data breach in 2019 was one of the most devastating data breaches of all time. The attack occurred due to a misconfiguration error at the firewall’s application layer. Impact: 80,000 bank account numbers; exposure of more than a million records with personal information, including Social Security number.
The Instagram breach involved a partner, Chtrbox, that had left a database exposed on Amazon Web Services. Impact: 50 million "influencer" records exposed.
Maintaining a secure posture ensures that enterprises have a systematic approach toward risk and possible exposure. It also establishes a guideline for prioritizing risks and how to respond to and remediate risk.
Hence, CloudOps and security teams tasked with securing the organization’s multicloud environments have focused on Cloud Security Posture Management or CSPM. CSPM is described as “a continuous process of cloud security improvement and adaptation to reduce the likelihood of a successful attack.”
There are many elements to public cloud security posture management. Considering the above factors, we have outlined a few of the best practices to maintain a healthy and secure posture in a public multicloud environment.
Industry trends show a substantial migration of workloads to the public cloud, and the rapid adoption of cloud-based software-as-a-service offerings signifies that it will continue for quite some time. As organizations increase their public cloud footprint, they will encounter cloud-specific risk, security, and compliance threats, which are challenging to address without the right tools and processes.
“Nearly all successful attacks on cloud services result from customer misconfiguration, mismanagement, and mistakes. Security and risk management leaders should invest in cloud security posture management processes and tools to proactively identify and remediate these risks."
– Gartner
Zscaler CSPM can help enterprises maintain a secure posture in a multicloud environment. It helps to continuously monitor cloud risk through identification, prioritization, and remediation based on common frameworks, regulatory requirements, and organization policies. By extending these solutions directly into the development process, security teams can proactively identify and remediate cloud risks before production.
The public multicloud environment has many advantages and, as long as enterprises use it for these advantages, it will continue to be exploited and targeted. However, implementing the right tools and strategies can support the enterprise to maintain a secure cloud posture.
Learn more at zscaler.com/cspm
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