Managing Cloud Risks with Cloud-Native Protection

The pandemic generated quite a bit of demand in the cloud, thanks primarily to organizations scrambling over night to transform their IT architectures and implement more of a hybrid model. This allowed businesses to more quickly adapt to the work from anywhere environment and still maintain normal business operations.

Too many security solutions, weakened security

The rush to the cloud added to the burden of security and operations teams because cloud environments are both varied and complex. As a result, standard security solutions are unable to respond to these new dangers in a sufficient manner. Organizations will continue to invest in innovative security solutions in the fast-changing IT world to address emerging risks.

The issue is that many of these are point solutions and are not interconnected, which causes an organization’s infrastructure to become more complicated and dispersed with every new solution introduced. The result is a fragmented security architecture, making administration difficult, increasing risk exponentially. In fact, one study showed that 59% of enterprises have implemented over 50 different security tools, with security teams using most of them to look into and address typical security events.

The dangers of alert fatigue

Organizations sometimes underestimate the number of security notifications that are produced by each security solution as they proactively improve their solutions to attain better security coverage and fortify their defenses. Additionally, some security solutions might generate thousands of alerts per day, which many firms lack the resources to organize and manage.

Security teams are forced to manually study and evaluate alerts because many notifications lack the context necessary to prioritize their mitigation efforts. This makes it more challenging to manage risk and respond to security demands in a timely manner. And as a result, alert fatigue affects over 80% of security analysts. Additionally, a recent study discovered that when their queue grows too full, more than one-third of security analysts end up disregarding security notifications.

One of the major tasks of CISOs is proactively managing risk. And you can control and reduce risk by putting effective security tools in place. Security may be compromised, though, if the security teams are overwhelmed by the quantity of data to investigate or are ignoring alerts entirely. Missing a single alert might mean the difference between protecting a company from a serious risk and allowing a widespread security breach to affect many users and harm the company’s reputation.

Cloud service providers and security

Cloud service providers (CSPs) keep making investments in technology to protect cloud resources. Additionally, many CSP security services have improved their capacity to provide vulnerability, risk and threat information for compute, database and storage resources. This is encouraging, given that 57% of businesses have had trouble locating cloud security experts to handle the complicated threat environment.

Organizations can offer their customers a variety of advantages by using a CSP’s cloud-native security services. These are the most deployable and have thorough infrastructure and service integration for that particular cloud environment. As a result, integration issues that many organizations encounter due to a fragmented security architecture are lessened. These services also offer broader coverage because they have access to security events that external security solutions do not, which makes it easier to monitor and safeguard cloud workloads.

Cloud-native security platforms (CNSPs) complement CSP-native security services, as well as security mesh products, to provide a multi-layered approach to managing cloud risks. An immediate benefit is that CNSPs can help organizations reduce the number of security tools deployed – an ideal CNSP leverages CSP-native services whenever possible and provides additive capabilities on top.  There is also technology available that can analyze security results from the CSP’s cloud-native security services and security products to give actionable, context-rich insights for their cloud resources. Actionable alerts enable enterprises to secure the use of diverse public cloud resources like containers, database services, compute instances and data storage services by prioritizing action based on the threat level of incidents.

Analysis tools can quantify risk and stack-rank resources depending on their risk score to assist security teams in prioritizing the most important threats. This helps users to get the most out of security technologies without deluging security staff with a tsunami of security data.

CNSPs employ the APIs of each platform to obtain visibility for the cloud workloads and analyze and rank resource threats across cloud environments. Analysis tools can quantify risk and stack-rank resources depending on their risk score to assist security teams in prioritizing the most important concerns. This helps users to get the most out of security technologies without deluging security staff with a lot of often generated security data.

By decreasing alert fatigue and allowing teams to concentrate on the dangers with the biggest potential impact, stack-ranking improves productivity for security teams. Additionally, cloud-native protection platforms help CISOs identify the advantages of the deployed security solutions and accelerate the value of cloud-native security controls, which are the simplest for developers to apply. Reports can be generated by CISOs to demonstrate the evolution of an organization’s security posture.

CNSPs enables enterprises to develop unique policies that can review cloud configurations using sophisticated scripting capabilities, in addition to the established configuration assessment policies used to control standards-based and best-practice misconfiguration risk.

Streamlining security operations

Some CNSPs can integrate with digital workflow products like JIRA and ServiceNow to automate and manage the process for users to suit their unique needs, which speeds up the mitigation and remediation process for high-priority risk insights.

For improvements that should ultimately be implemented in the CI/CD pipeline, organizations can implement stop-gap measures for cloud environments via a cloud security product to guard from attacks before the permanent remedies are applied. Consistent workflows provided across multiple clouds aid security teams in reducing coverage gaps and boosting output.

Putting it all together

Organizations must adapt their approaches to proactively manage cloud risk. The starting point of handling vulnerabilities, risk and threats for compute, database and storage resources is the use of cloud-native security services that provide comprehensive and effective security coverage. The integration problems that many firms frequently face can be reduced by using these services, which are also the simplest to implement. Organizations can maximize the return on their investments while focusing on high-risk items and proactively manage risk by integrating the security alerts from these services and cloud security products with thorough and context-rich alert technologies.

Learn how Fortinet’s cloud security solutions provide the necessary visibility and control across cloud infrastructures, enabling secure applications and connectivity from data center to cloud.