Secure Your Cloud!

With the increasing importance of data sovereignty, encryption and key management have become a critical component of any organization’s compliance and end user access.  Data encryption helps protect sensitive information by ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of information shared within or outside an enterprise.  With cloud environments, systems and data are not hosted within the confines of buildings controlled by the organization.  Additionally, having a comprehensive approach to key management and rotation ensures that the appropriate individuals have access when needed, without compromising security protocols.  Organizations should therefore review their cloud regularly to ensure all necessary components for secure encryption and key management are in place.

Having adequate policies, and ensuring they’re enforced, is essential in any organization and doesn’t change when the organization moves from traditional on-premise solutions to cloud based ones.  Security governance can not only assess the risks of various cloud implementations, but also provide a security baseline that can be used to protect against potential threats.  Enforcement of those standards has become more accessible with adopting cloud technology.  While more accessible, setting up those technologies can be difficult, and a review can help ensure existing data structures meet security standards throughout its lifecycle.

While password management plays an important role in information security, secrets in a cloud environment as a whole can be much more short lived and dynamic.  Secrets storage and management reviews provide a thorough check on the security posture of systems and their potentially sensitive data.  It is essential to ensure that secrets meet complexity guidelines, utilize two-factor authentication, are not easily guessed, and their lifecycle is as short as possible.  Without proper secrets management, security software is unable to prevent malicious actors from getting access to an organization’s systems.  A cloud review can identify any areas of improvement in secrets management and their lifecycle.  Doing so helps reduce the chances of an incident or breach resulting from compromised credentials.

Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is a critical component of an effective security infrastructure.  It offers ongoing audits of activities, allowing organizations to monitor and alert on the integrity and behavior of their systems.  Security teams can quickly identify when malicious activity occurs and take appropriate action.  Cloud environments give security teams more information into individual systems than ever before and a cloud review helps uncover weaknesses when attempting to detect anomalous or malicious activities.  Comprehensive event logging can help organizations avoid being caught off guard during a potential incident and narrow down the root cause for a faster resolution.

Configuring firewalls with the appropriate policies is an important component of an effective security architecture.  Cloud solutions now offer extremely granular policies and, unlike on-prem environments, they are available out of the box.  A review should be performed to ensure that modern firewall best practices and policies are being leveraged effectively.  For example, cloud environments offer identity based policies which allow multiple workloads on the same “physical” host, but each application is only able to access specific resources.  Even the “physical” host could be blocked from the same resources, since it won’t have the same identity associated with it.  A cloud review also provides guidance on how you can tailor the existing policies for more precise enforcement, as well as allowing for greater granularity when creating additional policies in the future.

A cloud review is an important part of the process for setting up a cloud environment, as it highlights weaknesses that need to be addressed and areas for improving automation to aid in a robust, secure cloud environment.  Cloud reviews provide an accurate snapshot of how resources can be best utilized and automated.  Tools such as AWS Config and Defender for Cloud are often used to constantly evaluate existing configurations across the entire cloud solution, comparing them against established baselines and providing notifications when deviations are detected.  This gives administrators insight into potential threats and hazards they should look out for, while also identifying security best practices and help improve overall security of the environment.