Cloud has become the de facto norm in today’s digital and global village. Modern-day companies are rushing to shift their services to cloud infrastructures because it fulfils their demand for unlimited computing and storage requirements without compromising on the security aspect.
The key here is ‘security.’ Yes, cloud-native applications smartly leverage the power of cloud computing and build super-resilient solutions that are implicitly secure. Before diving into how cloud-native has revolutionized the world of cybersecurity, it is important to understand what cloud-native is and why it is considered the future of software development.
What is Cloud Native, and What are Cloud Native Applications?
Cloud-native is a modern approach to designing applications that can run in a cloud computing environment. The applications designed through this approach are called cloud-native applications. These applications can take advantage of the scalability and flexibility offered by the cloud infrastructure as they are built using microservices architecture and containerization technologies like Docker.
Enterprises also use continuous integration and continuous delivery practices to develop and deploy cloud-native applications constantly. This enables them to iterate and deploy new features from time to time rapidly. Cloud-native applications are also carefully designed to be self-sustaining to ensure that they operate even when an individual component fails.
Why is Cloud Native Considered the Future of Software Development?
The future of software development will revolve around creating highly scalable and resilient applications. Cloud-native applications fulfill that criterion completely. Thanks to its ability to leverage microservices architecture, it offers on-demand scalability. Similarly, it provides extensive reliability through distributed systems.
A cloud-native approach will result in faster time to market, lowered costs, and a better user experience, all of which will be the key ingredients of successful software development in the coming days.
The cloud-native approach also ensures that the developers find it easier to build and deploy applications, another need of the hour. They can easily leverage managed services and abstract away the underlying infrastructure and deployment details.
Now that you understand the importance of cloud-native applications in software development, let us understand more about cloud native security benefits.
What are the Benefits of Cloud Native Security?
Here are some cloud-native application security benefits:
- Cloud native security solutions can automatically adjust to protect applications as they grow, rather than being limited by the resources of a single server.
- Cloud native security solutions enable you to perform continuous testing across all CI/CD layers. This way, you and your team can monitor and mitigate security incidents effortlessly at an individual component level of the application.
- Cloud native security solutions are designed to be highly automated. As a result, they can detect and respond to threats in real time in your application without any human intervention. This significantly helps minimize the impact of security attacks and, at the same time, reduces the workload of your security team.
- Cloud native security solutions are usually integrated with managed services offered by cloud providers. This means the cloud provider will implement and manage security for your application on your behalf, enabling you to focus on more mission-critical activities.
Here are some cloud native data security benefits:
- Cloud native security solutions automate the entire encryption process. This way, they can ensure that data is always encrypted when it is stored or transmitted.
- Cloud native security solutions help implement robust access controls. This way, they can ensure that only authorized users can access all the sensitive data.
- Cloud native security solutions help organizations prevent data loss. It does this by effectively monitoring potential threats and alerting administrators whenever any unusual activity is detected.
- Cloud native security solutions help create and maintain secure backups of their data. This way, they ensure that the data is always available and can be recovered in case of a disaster.
- Cloud native security tools help organizations meet various regulatory requirements like HIPAA and GDPR.
How has Cloud Native Revolutionized the Approach to Cybersecurity?
In the past, cybersecurity predominantly relied on a perimeter-based model. It revolved around firewalls and browser isolation systems that surrounded the on-premise networks. This approach worked well mainly because of the physically isolated infrastructure where developers built the application while the IT team handled the security. But as time progressed, organizations started embracing digital transformation on a massive scale; the IT teams were unable to build barriers in this ever-expanding tech environment, making cybersecurity more complex than before.
This led to the growth of cloud-native architectures that revolutionized the approach to cybersecurity. For starters, it made in-app security more important than ever. Since cloud-native is based on microservices architecture, the developers could infuse hyper granular security controls within the application. Also, the team could use traditional security controls and handle cybersecurity in a siloed and reactionary manner. This bolstered security and reduced compliance risks to a large extent.
Cloud-native architecture is also supported by Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM). To the unversed, it is a method of continuously monitoring and managing the security of an organization’s cloud environment. CSPM tools identify and evaluate potential cybersecurity risks and proactively implement security controls to mitigate those risks. They even monitor the efficacy of those controls over time.
CSPM helps organizations ensure that their cloud environments are free from cybersecurity risks and compliant with relevant regulations. CSPM is also quite effective in identifying and remediating misconfigurations that could compromise security.
Conclusion
By leveraging the scalability, flexibility, and agility of cloud-native architecture, you can build and deploy applications that can take full advantage of the benefits of the cloud. As the adoption of cloud computing grows in the coming years, the importance of cloud-native architecture will only continue to increase proportionately.
Now, cloud native security is important for any enterprise using cloud computing environments. Thankfully, cloud native security tools protect their data, ensure compliance with various regulations, and reduce the overall costs and workload associated with security.
