The Enterprise Guide to Cloud Security Posture Management

Editor's Note: The following is an article written for and published in DZone's 2024 Trend Report, Enterprise Security: Reinforcing Enterprise Application Defense.

Many companies wrongly believe that moving to the cloud means their cloud provider is fully responsible for security. However, most known cloud breaches are caused by misconfigurations on the customer's end, not the provider's. Cloud security posture management (CSPM) helps organizations avoid this problem by implementing automated guardrails to manage compliance risks and identify potential misconfigurations that could lead to data breaches. 

The term CSPM was first coined by Gartner to define a category of security products that automate security and ensure organizations are compliant in the cloud. While continuous monitoring, automation, and proper configuration significantly simplify cloud security management, CSPM solutions offer even more. CSPM tools provide deep insights into your cloud environment by: 

• Identifying unused resources that drain your budget
• Mapping security team workflows to reveal inefficiencies
• Verifying the integrity of new systems
• Pinpointing the most used technologies

Despite these benefits, there are important challenges and considerations that enterprises need to address. In this article, we discuss how to navigate these complexities, explore the key challenges of implementing CSPM, and provide insights into maximizing its benefits for effective cloud security management.

Foundational Pillars of Enterprise CSPM: The Challenges

A security baseline sets the minimum security standards that your organization's technology must meet. However, it's important to note that despite the security baseline being a foundational element, it is not the only one. A comprehensive security program also includes specific security controls, which are the technical and operational measures you implement to meet the baseline standards.

Gartner defines CSPM as a solution that "uses standard frameworks, regulations, and policies to identify and assess risks in cloud services configurations." Although CSPM solutions are essential for managing complex, perimeterless multi-cloud environments, they come with their own set of challenges. More than anything, the challenge is to shift away from traditional, perimeter-based security models toward a proactive, adaptive approach that prioritizes continuous monitoring and rapid response.

The following challenges, compounded by the scale and dynamism of modern cloud infrastructures, make the effective deployment of CSPM solutions a significant task.

Asset Inventory and Control

Most enterprise leaders are aware of the challenges in securing assets within a hybrid environment. The ephemeral nature of cloud assets makes it difficult to establish a baseline understanding of what's running, let alone secure it. In such instances, manual inventory checks turn out to be too slow and error prone. Basic tagging can provide some visibility, but it's easily bypassed or forgotten.

Given the fundamental issues of securing dynamic assets, several scenarios can impact effective inventory management:

• Shadow IT. A developer's experiment with new virtual machines or storage buckets can become a security risk if the commissioned resources are not tracked and decommissioned properly. Unmanaged instances and databases left exposed can not only introduce vulnerabilities but also make it difficult to accurately assess your organization's overall security risk.
• Configuration drift. Automated scripts and manual updates can inadvertently alter configurations, such as opening a port to the public internet. Over time, these changes may introduce vulnerabilities or compliance issues that remain unnoticed until it's too late.
• Data blind spots. Sensitive data often gets replicated across multiple regions and services, accessed by numerous users and applications. This complex data landscape complicates efforts to track sensitive information, enforce access controls, and maintain regulatory compliance.

Identity and Access Management at Scale

Access privileges, managed through identity and access management (IAM), remain the golden keys to an enterprise's prime assets: its data and systems. A single overlooked permission within IAM could grant unauthorized access to critical data, while over-privileged accounts become prime targets for attackers. Traditional security measures, which often rely on static, predefined access controls and a focus on perimeter defenses, cannot keep up with this pace of change and are inadequate for securing distributed workforces and cloud environments. Quite naturally, the risk of IAM misconfigurations amplifies with scale. This complexity is further amplified by the necessity to integrate various systems and services, each with its own set of permissions and security requirements.

Table 1. Advanced IAM challenges and their impact

Data Protection

Effective data protection in the cloud requires a multi-layered approach that spans the entire data lifecycle — from storage to transmission and processing. While encryption is a fundamental component of this strategy, real-world breaches like the 2017 Equifax incident, where attackers exploited a vulnerability in unpatched software to access unencrypted data, underscore that encryption alone is insufficient. Even with robust encryption, data can be exposed when decrypted for processing or if encryption keys are compromised.

Given these limitations, standards like GDPR and HIPAA demand more than just encryption. These include data loss prevention (DLP) solutions that detect and block unauthorized data transfers or tokenization and masking practices to add extra layers of protection by replacing or obscuring sensitive data. Yet these practices are not without their challenges. Fine-tuning DLP policies to minimize false positives and negatives can be a time-consuming process, and monitoring sensitive data in use (when it's unencrypted) presents technical hurdles. On the other hand, tokenization may introduce latency in applications that require real-time data processing, while masking can hinder data analysis and reporting if not carefully implemented.

Network Security for a Distributed Workforce and Cloud-Native Environments

The distributed nature of modern workforces means that employees are accessing the network from various locations and devices, often outside the traditional corporate perimeter. This decentralization complicates the enforcement of consistent network security policies and makes it challenging to monitor and manage network traffic effectively. CSPM solutions must adapt to this dispersed access model, ensuring that security policies are uniformly applied and that all endpoints are adequately protected.

In cloud-native environments, cloud resources such as containers, microservices, and serverless functions require specialized security approaches. Traditional security measures that rely on fixed network boundaries are ineffective in such environments. CSPM solutions must adapt to this dispersed access model, ensuring that security policies are uniformly applied and that all endpoints are adequately protected.

It is also common for enterprises to use a combination of legacy and modern security solutions, each with its own management interface and data format. The massive volume of data and network traffic generated in such large-scale, hybrid environments can be overwhelming. A common challenge is implementing scalable solutions that can handle high throughput and provide actionable insights without introducing latency.

Essential Considerations and Challenge Mitigations for Enterprise-Ready CSPM

A CSPM baseline outlines the essential security requirements and features needed to enhance and sustain security for all workloads of a cloud stack. Although often associated with IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), CSPM can also be used to improve security and compliance in SaaS (Software as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service) environments. To advance a baseline, organizations should incorporate policies that define clear boundaries. The primary objective of the baseline should be to serve as the standard for measuring your security level.

The baseline should encompass not only technical controls but also the following operational aspects of managing and maintaining the security posture.

Infrastructure as Code for Security

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) involves defining and managing infrastructure using code, just like you would with software applications. With this approach, incorporating security into your IaC strategy means treating security policies with the same rigor as your infrastructure definitions. Enforcing policies as code enables automated enforcement of security standards throughout your infrastructure's lifecycle. 

Designing IaC templates with security best practices in mind can help you ensure that security is baked into your infrastructure from the outset. As an outcome, every time you deploy or update your asset inventory, your security policies are automatically applied. The approach considerably reduces the risk of human error while ensuring consistent application of security measures across your entire cloud environment.

When designing IaC templates with security policies, consider the following:

• Least privilege principle. Administer the principle of least privilege by granting users and applications only the required permissions to perform their tasks. 
• Secure defaults. Ensure that your IaC templates incorporate secure default configurations for resources like virtual machines, storage accounts, and network interfaces from the start.
• Automated security checks. Integrate automated security testing tools into your IaC pipeline to scan your infrastructure templates for potential vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and compliance violations before deployment.

Threat Detection and Response

To truly understand and protect your cloud environment, leverage logs and events for a comprehensive view of your security landscape. Holistic visibility allows for deeper analysis of threat patterns, enabling you to uncover hidden misconfigurations and vulnerable endpoints that might otherwise go unnoticed. 

But detecting threats is just the first step. To effectively counter them, playbooks are a core part of any CSPM strategy that eventually utilize seamless orchestration and automation to speed up remediation times. Define playbooks that outline common response actions, streamline incident remediation, and reduce the risk of human error. For a more integrated defense strategy, consider utilizing extended detection and response to correlate security events across endpoints, networks, and cloud environments.

To add another layer of security, consider protecting against ransomware with immutable backups that can't be modified. These backups lock data in a read-only state, preventing alteration or deletion by ransomware. A recommended CSPM approach involves write once, read many storage that ensures data remains unchangeable once written. Implement snapshot-based backups with immutable settings to capture consistent, point-in-time data images. Combine this with air-gapped storage solutions to disconnect backups from the network, preventing ransomware access.

Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms

A cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) is a security solution specifically designed to protect applications built and deployed in cloud environments. Unlike traditional security tools, CNAPPs address the unique challenges of cloud-native architectures, such as microservices, containers, and serverless functions. When evaluating a CNAPP, assess its scalability to ensure it can manage your growing cloud infrastructure, increasing data volumes, and dynamic application architectures without compromising performance. The solution must be optimized for high-throughput environments and provide low-latency security monitoring to maintain efficiency.

As you consider CNAPP solutions, remember that a robust CSPM strategy relies on continuous monitoring and automated remediation. Implement tools that offer real-time visibility into cloud configurations and security events, with immediate alerts for deviations. Integrate these tools with your CSPM platform to help you with a thorough comparison of the security baseline. 

Automated remediation should promptly address issues, but is your enterprise well prepared to tackle threats as they emerge? Quite often, automated solutions alone fall short in these situations. Many security analysts advocate incorporating red teaming and penetration testing as part of your CSPM strategy. Red teaming simulates real-world attacks to test how well your security holds up against sophisticated threats to identify vulnerabilities that automated tools would commonly miss. Meanwhile, regular penetration testing offers a deeper dive into your cloud infrastructure and applications, revealing critical weaknesses in configurations, access controls, and data protection. 

Conclusion

With more people and businesses using the cloud, the chances of security problems, both deliberate and accidental, are on the rise. While data breaches are a constant threat, most mistakes still come from simple errors in how cloud systems are set up and from people making avoidable mistakes. 

In a security-first culture, leaders must champion security as a core component of the business strategy. After all, they are the ones responsible for building and maintaining customer trust by demonstrating a strong commitment to safeguarding data and business operations. The ways that cloud security can be compromised are always changing, and the chances of accidental exposure are growing. But a strong and flexible CSPM system can protect you and your company with quick, automatic responses to almost all cyber threats.

This is an excerpt from DZone's 2024 Trend Report, Enterprise Security: Reinforcing Enterprise Application Defense.

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