Cloud computing is evolving into one of the biggest de facto standards of delivering IT services across all sectors. According to the 2019 Public Cloud Trends report from the Enterprise Strategy Group, the use of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environments has shot up in the past eight years from 17 % of the organizations to 58%, and 39% of the organizations report they have a cloud-first mentality to all of their technology deployments.
It’s proven to be a boon for innovation but cybersecurity organizations continue to struggle to keep up with the constant developments and changes in cloud technology. One of the biggest challenges they face is gaining visibility of cloud infrastructure and resources. In a recent study published by Cloud Security Alliance, they’ve noted that nearly 75% of companies with assets in the public cloud cited lack of visibility as a major challenge.
Let’s look at these blind spots in detail.
Business-Managed IT
Enterprises and organizations that believe in managing their cloud assets and resources on their own are believed to have their cloud infrastructure managed and run by themselves. This approach to cloud adoption has proven to be a challenge for them because by doing so they are not encouraging collaboration from IT and Security professionals. The business managed IT silos the become a huge security blind-spot for these organizations. These same organizations innovate faster but also they’re twice as likely to have multiple areas of security risk exposures
Cloud Misconfiguration
Misconfiguration of IaaS and cloud data stores is the leading cause of some of the most damaging cloud breaches and data exposures today. Whether it’s from turning off default security settings, using default passwords, allowing unrestricted access to services – misconfiguration problems such as these introduce a raft of hidden risks that are frequently uncovered only post an incident. This proves to be one of the biggest challenges in the cloud industry
Hybrid Architecture and Multicloud Purchasing
According to a report published by Cloud Security Alliance, 55% of organizations run complex cloud computing environments that operate with a hybrid architecture. Such as setup offers a greater way for larger organizations to transition gradually to the cloud but introduces security visibility challenges as organizations struggle to track assets across entire architecture and monitor activity across complex hybrid setups. Firemon shows that 80% of organizations are challenged by the limitations and complexity of tools used for monitoring and managing security across hybrid environments.
Containers and Container Orchestration
The use of containerized workloads and container orchestration is skyrocketing in the cloud as organizations leverage the ephemeral flexibility and scalability of containerization to feed the rapid improvements of continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) in software development. But new platforms like Kubernetes are introducing new classes of misconfigurations and vulnerabilities to cloud environments faster than security teams can even wrap their arms around how container technology works. According to recent research by AimPoint Group on behalf of StackRox, 40% of organizations today remain at the planning or basic stages of security strategy for container environments, and an additional 19% still have no strategy at all.
Dark Data
Unclassified and unmanaged data — also known as “dark data” — is a huge problem for most enterprises today, whether that data is on-premises or in the cloud. Organizations struggle to protect dark data due to the fact they can’t secure assets they don’t know about. According to a recent survey conducted by Vanson Bourne for Veritas, dark data is particularly acute in public cloud environments, where three in five companies say they’ve classified less than half of their public cloud data.
Forensics and Threat-Hunting Telemetry
Some of the biggest cloud blind spots that security teams are battling today are related to forensics and threat-hunting telemetry. Not only do organizations struggle to get the right information fed from all of their different cloud resources, but even when they do manage to do this they face an uphill battle. Just consolidating that data and correlating it with on-premises telemetry becomes its own nightmare — a form of multi-dashboard blindness for incident response and threat-hunting teams.
According to the SANS Institute, over half of the organizations faced frustrations in getting low-level logs and systems information for forensics from their cloud providers, and less than one in three organizations have been able to integrate the forensics and incident-response tools they use in-house with their public cloud environments.
Blazeclan’s Cloud Security Operations Centre
Blazeclan developed a cloud security framework that addresses the above-highlighted cloud security loopholes and enables organizations and enterprises to gain visibility across their cloud environments. The framework consists of the following pillars:
Cloud Security Assessments
Our security team works alongside our clients to detect, identify and note their cloud assets and resources. Irrespective of the client having a single cloud or a multi-cloud environment, our team helps the organization gain visibility into their environments. Doing so helps the organization gain visibility on their risk and exposure points and help them address these security risks.
Cloud Security Monitoring
Monitoring the cloud environment in near-real-time becomes very important for the organization as they need to stay on top of the agile nature of innovation. Our cloud security monitoring solution comprises of the best-in-class tool with threat detection engines and a set of professional experts enable the organization not only detect security events but also help with incident response and forensics.
Cloud Vulnerability Assessments and Penetration Testing
To stay on top of addressing security risks and threats that arise due to not patching and upgrading services and software, Blazeclan offers cloud vulnerability assessments and penetration testing. Our team of experts not only identifies and assess cloud environments but also assists them in addressing the detected threats.
Please get in touch with us to know more about how Blazeclan can help you stay secure on the cloud while you continue innovating.