Infrastructures, threat, and security are all under a quick, constant evolution. Once every few year there comes a tipping point which forces us to rethink our technology posture. 2020 was that tipping point.
The cloud surge has peaked during the Pandemic, as remote work became the new normal for most office-based businesses. This has introduced insider threats at an unprecedented scale, forcing companies to rethink fundamental concepts like user identities, permissions, and secure access.
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In parallel, we saw a widespread adoption of Open Source code as part of the software development cycle – introducing the threat of undiscovered vulnerabilities and dependencies to almost any product out there.
Lastly, InfoSec compliance standards (like anything accounting, really) become increasingly complex as they evolve, and and apply to more companies than ever before.
Happening pretty much all at once, these trends now require a new approach to innovation adoption in general, and to cloud security architecture in particular. Having said that, we don’t want security to slow down the business as it has done so far. On today’s global, hypercompetitive business landscape, where everyone just seeks to scale as quickly as possible, security is often an afterthought – and this is a dangerous habit. We know that shifting left will only be realized if security stops becoming a nuisance.
Hence we sat down to define the basics of an adequate security stack – the very minimum that can protect the digital business from 2021’s security threats, while allowing core business processes like product development run uninterrupted.
The What: 5 Must-Have Solutions on New Cloud Security Stack
- Identity & Access Management (IAM) – Integrating MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) and SSO (Single Sign-On) in employees’ remote access workflows should be the new standard of interacting with enterprise applications from anywhere, anytime. Automate employee onboarding, offboarding and role change provisioning to enable quick growth.
- Zero Trust Access – No one can be trusted these days, as attackers can gain control of legitimate employees’ laptops and gain access to the corporate network. Zero Trust Access solutions can enforce authentication and authorization for employees and limit their access to enterprise resources based on the least privilege principle to minimize the attack surface.
- Open Source Security – Developers rely heavily on open source packages when building their code more like lego than painting from scratch. Dependencies rely on other dependencies and it takes only one vulnerability in an open-source class to cause potential harm to many corporate products built using this class. Open-source security solutions will continuously monitor and detect all the open-source dependencies in the code and alert on any vulnerabilities.
- Cloud Workload Protection – In a world where many companies are using public cloud computing, storage and networking services, there are different cybersecurity threats aiming to gain access to sensitive data and exfiltrate it from the cloud. CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management) and CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection Platforms) solutions can detect and minimize excessive permissions and misconfigurations in the public cloud.
- End-to-End Compliance – compliance is a necessary evil that’s becoming more relevant than ever. Whether you’re a B2B company and would like to sell your services to large enterprises, financial institutions, healthcare and public sector organizations, or you’re a B2C company and must store and protect your end-user’s private information – you must include end-to-end compliance in your product design process.
The How: 4 Must-Have Traits of Cloud Security Solutions
- SaaS Consumption Model – No more hardware-based appliances you need to plan and pay for years in advance. The ability to scale your usage up or down and pay for what you use is crucial in today’s rapidly changing reality. Automatic updates to the solution, (ensure a solution is always up-to-date) closing the consumption gap by inheriting the new features of each update.
- DevOps & Integrations – The ability to integrate with existing tools and components within the company’s IT / DevOps environment: communication & collaboration apps (Slack), centralized monitoring / SIEM (Sumo Logic), API interface to make configuration changes or view reports, Active Directory, GSuite / Office365, HR Systems and other enterprise apps. No more UI-only based solutions you must manage from dedicated interfaces. Born in the cloud and originally designed for cloud environments – not converted.
- Noise-Free Alerts & Remediation – The ability to learn the company’s normal patterns and alert / act only on highly suspicious, true positive anomalies. Solutions that have AI or ML capabilities, using big data to determine which activities are malicious and require intervention, and in what priority.
- Compliance Assistance – Using security solutions that enable compliance with the common security standards such as PCI-DSS, ISO-27001, SOC2, etc. By implementing them, companies can achieve security compliance faster with fewer efforts involved.
Conclusion
Cybersecurity threats grow at a rapid pace as new technologies emerge. CIOs and CISOs are in a constant race to beat the bad actors and deploy the best in class security solutions. Make sure you evaluate new security solutions based on the traits above, consult with cybersecurity partners that deal with these challenges on a daily basis, in order to get you protected, not just covered.
Explore the new security stack further on our Cloud Security universe.
