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Month: April 2023

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) for Your Business: Why You Need it?

Posted on by Mahesh Hegde

Cloud computing has truly transformed how companies do business. Increased internet usage has driven businesses to look for cloud-based solutions to provide reliable and scalable digital products. However, your legacy systems can have dependencies when you move to the cloud. Such issues of legacy systems can affect the data on the cloud. This is why you need cloud security and risk assessments.

Another critical reason to assess cloud security is cost. Cyberattacks can cause data loss and costly recovery of sensitive information. Gartner predicts that cloud spending will reach $600 billion in 2023. So, assessing cloud security becomes critical. Cloud security posture management (CSPM) allows organizations to identify, evaluate and manage risks. It helps keep data secure and improves protection against cyberattacks. We will discuss CSPM and how it can help you reduce cyberattacks.

Why is cloud security posture management critical?

Cloud Security posture management risk management for cloud-based applications. It allows organizations to secure data and minimize attack surface areas. CSPM also helps to improve system security by identifying potential vulnerabilities and implementing preventative measures. In addition, CSPM security solutions help in risk assessment across the cloud-based infrastructure.

For example, CSPM tools can help your Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) by provisioning the database over the Internet. Further, it enables Software as a Service (SaaS) services to securely establish connections with users’ devices over the internet. It also allows organizations to leverage Platform as a Service (PaaS) with low-risk app development and deployment across cloud environments.

CSPM works at a level of the cloud provider’s control panel and uses APIs from the underlying architecture to offer more visibility for organizations. In addition, it provides better configuration management for cloud services and automatically validates several account settings across regions. However, there are many other benefits of using CSPM for your organization. Let’s understand some key benefits of cloud security posture management solutions.

What benefits of cloud security posture management?

Cloud security posture management can help organizations create and maintain a secure cloud environment. Specifically, it can help identify threats, assess risks, and recommend mitigation strategies. Further, CSPM can assist in monitoring compliance with regulations such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

CSPM security solutions help organizations better understand and manage the cloud infrastructure. It includes determining which apps to host on a cloud, at what level of security, and monitoring infrastructure changes. Additionally, it can identify and protect against data breaches.

Cloud security posture management can also help organizations automate the deployment and maintenance of cloud-based technologies. This can reduce the time needed to update or upgrade technologies and protect data from potential breaches. In addition to the benefits listed above, cloud security posture management can help in

  • Managing misconfigured storage buckets that are exposed to the public
  • Secure database resources for which public access is available
  • Encrypt data at rest and data in transit for better security
  • User access management and definition privileges
  • Change management for firewall rules, logging groups, or account settings
  • Ensure there are no unexpected security errors.

CSPM is a crucial aspect of your cloud-native development and deployment strategy, but there are challenges in managing risks across hybrid environments, compliance, costs, etc. Fortunately, there are tools and solutions that you can use to overcome these challenges.

Conclusion

Cloud security has become essential with increasing data and the need for security policy enforcement. Cloud security posture management solutions allow you to manage configurations, vulnerabilities, and risks and improve the safety of apps.

Most importantly, it enables organizations to manage infrastructure and optimize security. In addition, better security and higher user trust allow organizations to improve conversions and repeat customers. We have discussed many CSPM tools for enhanced security, but they must offer a comprehensive solution.

If you are looking for a free security assessment of your infrastructure, then your search ends here. Cloudlytics has been providing a free security assessment to organizations, helping them understand their security maturity and take suitable measures to maintain a robust security and compliance posture for their infrastructure.

ISO 27001: 2022: 5 Steps for Cloud Systems to Comply Better

Posted on by Team Cloudlytics

Cloud services have seen massive adoption due to the need for flexible and reliable infrastructure. You need to ensure cloud security and secure information. ISO 27001 is an information security standard that provides a framework for data security, privacy compliance, and risk management. Due to massive cloud adoption, companies migrate their workloads, which causes security issues like data loss, leaks, and compliance.

ISO 27001 helps companies

  • Secure data in all forms, which include non-digital, digital, and cloud-based information
  • Increase the resilience of systems against cyberattacks
  • Provide a framework to consolidate data across the system from a centralized location
  • Improve protection against malicious cyberattacks and data theft
  • Keep the systems updated against emerging cybersecurity threats

In 2022, ISO 27001 underwent an upgrade with changes to several key aspects, including control categories, number of controls, and more. Companies using cloud services and infrastructure for their information systems must comply with information security standards.

One of the best ways to ensure compliance with ISO 27001 channels and ensure a secure information system is to have robust cloud security posture management (CSPM). By 2025, 45% of organizations will experience breaches into their software supply chains, underlining the need for an enhanced CSPM system. We will discuss the impact of ISO 27001:2022 on your cloud infrastructure security and how to improve CSPM for better compliance.

A Brief on ISO 27001:2022 Concerning Cloud

ISO 27001, developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), is one of the leading international information security standards. It was created to help organizations secure data cost-efficiently and effectively. ISO 27001: 2022 is based on three main pillars.

  • Confidentiality: Organizations need to define who can access data. Also, only authorized persons should be able to access information.
  • Integrity: Changes in the data can be made by an authorized person only.
  • Availability: Data should be available to the authorized person whenever requested.

Organizations that use cloud services must ensure compliance with the pillars of ISO 27001: 2022. This means you need enhanced governance policies and constant monitoring of cloud-based workloads. Some of the fundamental changes introduced in ISO 27001: 2022 that you need to comply with are:

  • Clause 4.2 – Analysis of the interested party requirements must be addressed through ISMS
  • Clause 4.4 – Process planning and its requirement definitions are mandatory within ISMS
  • Clause 5.3 – Organizations need to have clarity on roles, and communications need to be transparent on responsibilities.
  • Clause 6.2 – Additional clauses added, making observation and monitoring of objectives mandatory.
  • Clause 6.3 – Makes the change planning in ISMS mandatory.
  • Clause 8.1– Addition of new requirements for the businesses to set security processes criteria and implement them across the organization
  • Clause 9.3 – Addition of clause to clarify inputs from the interested parties, which need to be in sync with their needs and expectations.
  • Clause 10 – Focuses on data conformity and how businesses must ensure information compliance.

One of the most significant changes in ISO 27001 introduced in 2022 was controls in data governance. Total controls have been reduced from 114 to 63 focusing more on security and access control. If you are using cloud infrastructure or have cloud-native applications, compliance with the changes in ISO 27001:2022 will require enhanced data access controls. Further, you will need effective data governance, security policy enforcement, and threat intelligence.

Role of CSPM in maintaining ISO 27001 compliance

CSPM helps ensure better data governance and security through advanced monitoring. It enables companies to build a robust information security management system (ISMS). ISMS is a set of policies and processes that help companies manage the security of their sensitive information. Some critical benefits of robust ISMS are:

  • Security for all data forms, whether digital assets, complex information, or company secrets
  • Resilience against major cyber threats increases
  • Improved cost optimization through risk assessment and analysis approach
  • A systematic framework to manage data security and governance

How to use CSPM for enhanced ISMS?

A cloud security posture management solution enables companies to gather and monitor configuration data across cloud services for risk mitigation. Further, it allows businesses to monitor workloads for better security and data protection continuously. You can use CSPM solutions to get insights into data exchanged, accessed, and processed to assess the system for vulnerabilities.

The following functionalities can be implemented with CSPM toward an enhanced ISMS:

Detecting anomalies

CSPM gathers data and maps configurations to the ISMS compliance requirements to ensure your business meets ISO 27001: 2022 requirements. One of the key requirements to comply with ISO 27001 standards is to have secure applications.

One way to ensure your applications are secure is to analyze anomalies in the system. These anomalies can be malicious data access events or unusual traffic to a single network node.

Monitoring and reporting

CSPM tools prioritize risk analysis and offer insight into what you can do to prevent risks. For example, it monitors all the data access across cloud environments and detects anomalies to report events. Based on such information, you can develop data access policies. Most CSPM tools have a centralized dashboard with reports that provide complete insight into data transactions across cloud infrastructure and environments.

Enhanced recommendations

There are many policy suggestions from CSPM tools based on the risk assessments you can apply for better cloud security. For example, CSPM provides insights into critical touchpoints in a cloud-based network that are vulnerable. So, you can secure them by fixing the vulnerabilities at specific touchpoints in the network. Further, CSPM reduces the manual efforts required by security professionals and helps build a cloud security posture for organizations.

Steps to improve cloud security posture management

CSPM is key to compliance and data security, but how does it improve its effectiveness? Here are some steps to make sure your cloud-based systems comply with ISO 27001 standards:

Step 1 – Define the risk assessment framework

You need to define the critical touchpoints in the system where sensitive data is stored, accessed, processed, and analyzed.

Step 2 – Map data configurations and security policies

According to the definition of critical touch points, frame data access policies, define roles, and map key information configurations.

Step 3 – Implement policies for secure data transactions

Apply security policies across systems, environments, and devices to make sure data transactions are secure.

Step 4 – Monitor cloud infrastructure for enhanced CSPM

Monitor all your cloud-based workloads for policy compliance and governance and improve cloud security posture management.

Step 5 – Finetune CSPM for improved compliance

Improve your system observability by enhancing the three key pillars: logs, metrics, and traces. Monitoring and logging cloud infrastructure events can help you gain key insights into security bottlenecks. Further, adjust the CSPM framework to reduce such security bottlenecks and ensure better compliance with standards like ISO 27001.

Conclusion

Cloud security is becoming tricky for many organizations as most companies focus on migrating workloads without effective CSPM. This is why it is important to have a platform that offers insights into threat intelligence and data governance and helps improve cloud security posture. Cloudlytics is a leading cloud security posture management solutions provider.

You can use the compliance manager from Cloudlytics to ensure enhanced CSPM and compliance with standards like ISO 27001. Register for a free trial and experience advanced cloud security experience.

Microsegmentation for Network Security: Everything You Need to Know

Posted on by Team Cloudlytics

Segmenting traffic, analyzing, and filtration for better security is not new. For example, organizations have used perimeter firewalls with VLANs to segment IT infrastructure for secure operations. However, cloud adoption and increased use of hybrid approaches have been causing a new security threat.

Microsegmentation is a method of segmenting the traffic that helps organizations secure sensitive information. It creates secure zones inside a network where you can isolate workloads from one another. In other words, organizations have granular control over the traffic that enters and leaves the network.

Having granular control is crucial for organizations that face an average cost of $4 million for a data breach, according to experts at Cloudlytics. So, let’s discuss how to use microsegmentation for network security and understand its benefits for enhanced network security.

What is Microsegmentation?

Microsegmentation in networking is often called an “upgrade” of popular network segmentation. You can use the microsegmentation approach to identify corrupted traffic, isolate workloads and enforce specific data access policies.

Take an example of an intruder into your network who enters through a gated community and gets free reign. Microsegmentation creates locked houses inside your gated community to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive information.

What microsegmentation offers is more than just isolated and gated workloads. Even if an intruder enters the gated and remote zones for data access, microsegmentation ensures no information leakage.

How Microsegmentation Works

Microsegmentation in networking works on the technique of controlling traffic through inter-group policies. It helps implement fine-grained isolation between data groups based on

  • An Endpoint group (EPG) is a group of entities that carries servers and VMs.
  • Group-based policy (GBP) is a security policy for network traffic control within EPGs.

Why Do Organizations Need Microsegmentation?

The conventional approach to segmentation was to treat any external traffic as insecure and internal data flows as secure. So, to secure external traffic, companies used firewalls deployed. Security analysis technologies used on the external parameters to segment malicious incoming traffic were termed border security technology.

However, during data scaling, organizations need to segment external and internal traffic. Especially when attacks cross the initial perimeter, the data center network is under threat. So, when companies started moving to cloud-based databases, it was essential to have security analysis systems that could secure internal and external traffic.

This is where microsegmentation helped businesses improve security dynamically for internal and external traffic.  One of the key benefits of using a microsegmentation firewall is enhanced security policy control. However, it goes beyond policy enforcement, and there are many other benefits of using microsegmentation in networking.

Benefits of Microsegmentation for Network Security

Some of the top benefits of microsegmentation solutions are the following:

  • It helps define traffic groups based on specific IP addresses, MAC addresses, and names of Virtual Machines.
  • Microsegmentation firewalls enhance data access control and help implement a zero-trust security system.
  • It enables organizations to minimize the attack surface and prevent cyber attackers from accessing sensitive information.
  • The microsegmentation solution helps isolate the workload and reduce network bandwidth consumption.
  • It also helps prevent centralized control points from being a blocker for data flow.

There is no denying that choosing microsegmentation for network security makes sense with its several benefits, but implementing it has many challenges.

Challenges with Implementing Microsegmentation

Implementing microsegmentation has its challenges due to mixed data traffic, multiple tiers of environment, and system dependencies.

Compliance with Regulations

Many countries have stringent privacy laws that may preclude the implementation of microsegmentation. For example, if you are a business operating in Europe, GDPR compliance becomes key to your operations. At the same time, data regulations at another location can be different from GDPR, making it challenging to implement microsegmentation across regions.

Business Perspectives

Microsegmentation can be difficult to justify and manage from a business perspective. You have to invest in microsegmentation implementation on resources, tools, staffing, and more. So, if the cost does not justify the end goal, it is hard for top-level executives to take a call on using the microsegmentation approach.

Risk Assessment Difficulties

It can be hard to determine which traffic is most sensitive or whether any given segment should receive special treatment. Especially if your data is unstructured, microsegmentation becomes complex and requires more effort.

Microsegmentation Use Cases

There are various use cases for microsegmentation in network security, including targeted attacks on individual users, data leakage prevention, and traffic management.

Prevent Targeted Attacks

Targeted attacks on individual users or particular applications can be prevented by configuring your network security infrastructure. Using microsegmentation for network security, you can isolate certain network parts from each other. Further, you can allow authorized traffic to pass freely between them while blocking access to suspicious or unauthorized content and devices.

Avoid Data Leakages

Data leakage prevention can be achieved by segmenting sensitive data sources into different microsegments and monitoring each for signs of violations. If an incident is detected, you can take appropriate action based on the type of information involved.

Manage Data Traffic

Traffic management might be necessary when dealing with high-volume or time-sensitive traffic.  For example, you might use microsegmentation to divide your network into different queues based on the type of traffic and then prioritize each cue according to its importance.

This way, you can ensure that important transactions are completed within the prescribed timeframe while allowing other types of traffic to flow more freely.

Other use cases for microsegmentation in network security include:

  • Segregation of user traffic to improve overall performance and protect confidential information
  • Segregating infected machines from healthy ones to stop the spread of infection or malware
  • Segregating active malicious users from normal users to better monitor their activity
  • Segregating customer traffic to improve customer experience and reduce spam
  • Segregating traffic for different applications (such as office productivity software, streaming video, and online gaming) to improve QoS
  • Segregating traffic from different parts of the world to reduce potential attacks from cross-border threats

Conclusion

As the business scale and data grow, you need more than just segmentation at an external parameter. With data flowing through multiple tiers of environments, a microsegmentation solution is the best way to ensure better security. However, implementing microsegmentation has challenges, which is where security analytics from Cloudlytics can help. So, contact us for comprehensive security intelligence to improve data protection.

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