Zscaler Posture Control and Splunk Integration: Cloud Transformation in the SOC

Cloud technologies with new development practices have significantly increased the velocity of fixes, enhancements, and features.  In some environments, developers are making changes and release code to production several times a day. CI/CD tools make it easy to spin up new cloud resources and deploy code quickly.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is widely adopted by organizations to quickly deploy, manage, and provision cloud resources repeatedly. Infrastructure is defined using code to consistently scale, update, delete, and provision infrastructure using automation tools. An inadvertently misconfigured template could affect thousands of cloud workloads. This amplification effect expands the attack surface, paving the way for new attack vectors. The focus on speed combined with IaC automation can cause a rapid spread of security issues. Security teams are unable to keep up with these changes. The latest audit of infrastructure may be out of date the day it's released.

The SOC plays a key role in keeping the enterprise safe. They need to have visibility into vulnerabilities introduced and be able to communicate changes needed to development teams. 

With Zscaler Posture Control integrations, Splunk customers can rest assured their cloud-native applications remain secure and compliant in each phase, from development to deployment. These enhancements enable Splunk customers to get complete control over cloud-native environments with fast risk detection and response as they accelerate their secure digital transformation journey.

Let’s take a closer look at this integration and how it helps to address some of the challenges. 

Comprehensive visibility and control: The integration simplifies operations for security teams with the ability to easily view actionable security data using a single console, reducing the need to pivot across disjointed management tools for point products. The new panels include IaC alerts and the top policies that generated them. This is useful for a security team to understand the risks of new templates coming out. Security exposure and attack vectors are also exposed in the dashboard, helping the SOC team identify gaps and threats in a single pane.

Streamlined incident response: By combining the power of Zscaler and Splunk, customers can improve security, while streamlining incident response. It provides the SOC valuable insight into IaC vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in cloud infrastructure from a new dashboard within the Zscaler App for Splunk. 

Reduced MTTR: It also helps in reducing MTTR with closed-loop workflows. In most cases security incidents that are logged lack context which makes it extremely difficult for security or cross-functional teams to quickly triage and remediate risk in real-time. Together, Zscaler Posture Control advanced risk correlation and Splunk can accelerate security incident workflows. public exposure, vulnerabilities, and misconfigurations can be identified, investigated, and remediated to help reduce the risk of a breach. The dashboards provide risk prioritization and visibility, and can reduce cross-team friction when discussing a security issue. This helps to reduce response time and increase productivity. 

Fig: Main Posture Control dashboard with top IaC critical alerts

Fig: Attack Vector alert: Identities without MFA and risk of permission elevation 

Fig: Cloud infrastructure alerts - exposed management ports and snapshot data

We hope you are as excited about Zscaler integration with Splunk. We are confident that integration will complement your security automation initiatives to streamline your multi-cloud estate's overall operational workflow and security. We encourage you to learn about integration or sign up for a free cloud security risk assessment today.