If your company relies on cloud-based infrastructure, it may be time to rethink your approach to multi-cloud security.
If your company relies on cloud-based infrastructure, it may be time to rethink your approach to multi-cloud security.
The current trends paint a clear picture:
It’s not hard to see what makes multi-cloud strategies compelling, but adopting them without proper security is a recipe for disaster.
In this article, you’ll learn:
The more moving parts in a system, the more likely it is to fail. This simple fact has been true since long before the cloud existed, and it applies to cloud infrastructure just as much as anything else.
All the moving parts in a multi-cloud ecosystem aren’t just potential points of failure, either. Each cloud platform is a potential entry point for threat actors and comes with its own risks and vulnerabilities.
Without proper security, you’re ultimately left with a sprawling digital ecosystem that offers threat actors multiple potential windows of attack.
Another problem is that traditional security tools aren’t designed for multi-cloud environments. They struggle to manage or even scale to complex cloud infrastructure. If a business fails to use a tool designed for multi-cloud deployments, it will have to contend with limited visibility, observability, and integration.
In other words, there’s a good chance they won’t know what an attacker is doing until it’s too late.
Before we discuss benefits and best practices, let’s take a moment to review some of the specific security challenges you’ll need to overcome.
This is the largest bugbear in multi-cloud security by far.
Each provider in a multi-cloud environment has its own security controls, architecture, applications, and management tools. A security solution that integrates well with one provider isn’t guaranteed to play nice with all of them. The same applies to monitoring solutions, meaning visibility and observability are also problematic.
Ensuring consistent policy enforcement is similarly daunting, as your team may have to juggle multiple configurations, dashboards, and standards. And the more consoles you have them managing, the greater the chance they’ll eventually make a mistake.
Lastly, each cloud provider will typically follow a different shared responsibility model. For example, one vendor might require you to manage your own encryption keys while another handles that task on your behalf.
Each provider in a multi-cloud environment can exponentially increase your business’s attack surface. To make matters worse, an attacker who compromises one component of a multi-cloud environment can easily move laterally to others. Let’s say, for example, a threat actor manages to exploit a misconfigured Amazon EC2 instance.
They could then use that instance as a staging ground to access other AWS components or clouds.
Just as vendors aren’t guaranteed to cooperate with security tools, they also don’t always integrate well with one another. Getting multiple services to work together seamlessly can be a nightmare operationally and from a security standpoint. Managing multiple vendors, bills, and contracts can put considerable strain on your employees.
Adopting a secure multi-cloud approach goes hand-in-hand with several benefits, including, but not limited to:
A multi-cloud environment is great for business operations, but it’s less great from a security standpoint. To secure a multi-cloud setup without making your team consider a career change, you must adhere to a few strategies and best practices.
You can’t stop what you can’t see, and cybercriminals work best in the dark. Make sure your multi-cloud security architecture includes some form of continuous monitoring functionality along with automated reporting, alerting, and triage.
Don’t just look for suspicious behavior or threat indicators. Also, look for misconfigured systems and misapplied policies. A Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solution can help you achieve this.
All of your monitoring and logging solutions should feed into a centralized dashboard that provides your team with a complete overview of what’s happening in your ecosystem.
Traditional network security is built on trusted access. Multi-cloud security cannot operate on the same principles. Instead, you need to authenticate and continuously validate the identity and validity of every user or device that accesses your ecosystem, working on the assumption that everyone is a potential threat actor, a principle known as zero trust access (ZTA).
Additionally, every user should only be given as much authority and access as they absolutely require to do their job. That means your accounting team shouldn’t have access to your development pipeline, nor should your web developers be able to see the backend for your payroll system. In other words, you must segment and enforce permissions based on each person’s role.
Take a moment to think about the threats and vulnerabilities your business is most likely to face. Define a set of security standards and controls that address those problems, ensuring they align with industry best practices and (if relevant) regulatory requirements. Now comes the hard part.
You’ll need a way to consistently enforce and apply these standards across your entire cloud ecosystem. While you can technically do this manually, automation is the better option, as it’ll help avoid misconfiguration or misapplication. Speaking of which, that brings us to our next point.
There’s a lot of manual work in cybersecurity:
The good news is that most of this can be automated. Instead of having your security team constantly chasing down stakeholders and threats, you can deploy a sort of multi-cloud digital immune system that automatically flags, and even remediates, security issues with minimal human intervention. The end result is a security team that works faster and smarter, with professionals free to focus on high-priority threats rather than busy work.
Even if your security looks ironclad, there’s always something you could be doing better, and there’s always the chance of a mistake or misconfiguration slipping by beneath the radar. That’s why auditing is so important. It allows you to identify:
Because cloud ecosystems are so sprawling and decentralized, it’s usually better to focus your security efforts on managing users and devices rather than systems. An identity and access management solution allows you to enforce policies such as role-based access control and multi-factor authentication while easily adopting and applying zero trust and least privilege. It can also help you more readily identify orphaned or compromised accounts.
Lastly, before you sign on with any cloud security vendor, perform a thorough assessment to ensure they understand and can fulfill your needs. Ensure you also understand what they offer and how they align with their security goals. It’s also advisable to run comprehensive proof of concept trials with each vendor and assess them based on reviews and testimonials.
Ideally, you’ll also want to seek a vendor with expertise in your industry, especially if you’re looking for a managed cloud security solution.
As long as you follow the best practices outlined above, you should be able to avoid most cloud security stumbling blocks. With that said, there are still a few pitfalls of which you’ll want to be aware.
Automation isn’t a silver bullet for all your security needs and challenges. You still need human professionals to be involved at some point. After all, there are some things even the most sophisticated security tools can’t do on their own.
At the same time, you should still automate while you can. We’ve already mentioned reporting, remediation, and threat intelligence. Provisioning and configuration represent another area where automation can make life considerably easier for your team.
Whatever you choose, you’ll need to find the right blend of automation and human expertise to ensure your cloud security has the agility and know-how to stay on top of alerts, vulnerabilities, and other obstacles.
Communication siloes can utterly destroy productivity, efficiency, and morale. And where cybersecurity is concerned, they also represent a huge risk. If your departments and teams are working entirely in isolation from one another, that means there are gaps in your visibility.
And if there are gaps in your visibility, that means there are places where a threat actor can sneak into your ecosystem unnoticed.
We’ve all been guilty of postponing a software update at one time or another. Maybe the update came out while we were in the middle of a project, or maybe we keep forgetting to install it overnight and then don’t have time during the day. You cannot afford to make this mistake with your cloud ecosystem.
Remember that unpatched vulnerabilities account for roughly 60% of breaches.
Off the top of your head, how many data breaches can you call to mind where it was later discovered that the business involved was storing passwords or other sensitive data in plaintext?
If you can even think of one, that’s too many.
Access keys, passwords, and other data related to authentication need to be securely stored. Otherwise, you’re doing the digital equivalent of leaving your house key on your doorstep. Just as a locked door doesn’t mean much to a home invader with a key, improperly stored credentials make it easy for threat actors to compromise your people, systems, and data.
Picture a fortress filled with precious resources. It’s nearly impenetrable, capable of withstanding multiple days of sieges. But it occasionally sends out caravans with supplies to other outposts and towns.
If someone wanted to get their hands on those supplies, which would be easier: Attacking the fortress or raiding one of those caravans?
Now, replace the fortress with your ecosystem and the resources with your data. Encrypting sensitive information at rest is not enough. If you don’t encrypt it in transit, criminals will wait for a transfer before they hijack it.
Resiliency and redundancy are two of the cloud’s greatest strengths. Make sure you leverage them to their fullest. That means having an automated backup strategy in place with multiple copies of critical systems and data. It also means regularly testing and monitoring your backups to ensure they aren’t malfunctioning (or, worse, compromised).
As with other data, these systems should be fully encrypted.
Achieving effective multi-cloud security demands that your business choose the right vendors and tools. That’s why Tamnoon has built our security solutions to address the unique challenges of multi-cloud environments through:
Ready to get your critical cloud exposure to 0? Book a demo today, and we’ll show you how we can get you there in 90 days.
An effective multi-cloud security solution should include a cloud workload protection platform, cloud security posture management, infrastructure-as-code scanning, runtime scanning, cloud infrastructure entitlement management, and integration with other security tools, such as identity management, security information, and event management.
Public cloud security operates on a different scope and scale than hybrid cloud security, as teams must contend with multiple cloud environments working independently. It focuses more on securing data and applications across diverse cloud instances through standardized policies and controls.
On the other hand, hybrid cloud security tends to be more concerned with integrating legacy and cloud systems and securing data as it moves between private and public clouds.
AI and machine learning are increasingly important not just for multi-cloud security but for the cybersecurity industry as a whole. Advanced AI models can analyze and orchestrate enormous volumes of data, identifying anomalies and threats that human personnel would be unable to detect in time. AI also enables the deployment of security tools capable of dynamically adapting and responding to threats.
