Cloud Security Posture Management for Hybrid Infrastructures

Along with the constant evolution of technologies and the growth in cloud utilization, new cyber threats, sophisticated malware, and attack methods arise. Naturally, businesses aiming to keep their environments and data safe must constantly adjust their cybersecurity systems to meet these new challenges. Implementing cloud security posture management is crucial in this endeavor, as it helps ensure that cloud environments are optimally configured to fend off attacks and stay several steps ahead of hackers.

In this eternal race of technologies, finding a correct solution, customizing it properly for your needs, and introducing it into the daily routine of the enterprise is a real challenge.

This article provides an overview of the existing classification of cloud security tools and targets. Specifically, it focuses on Cloud Security Posture Management (CSMP) as one of the core strategies for initial and ongoing security assessments, remediation recommendations building, and implementation.

Cloud Security: Basic Responsibilities and Approaches

When it comes to organizing cloud workload security, understanding the roles and responsibilities of the sides is crucial. With the public cloud providers, the Shared Responsibility Model approach is a standard one.

Here, typically, the Cloud Provider takes the responsibility for:

• The physical security (host, networks, datacentres)

• Host infrastructure (compute, storage, DBs)

• Network controls

The provider and the customer can share the responsibility for:

• Application layer

• Identity and access management

• Client and end-point protection

The customer, in turn, gets full responsibility for their data and information, local devices, and account organization.

While, as a customer, we can rely on the provider’s expertise for the areas and sections they cover, whether we get a secure cloud infrastructure depends on the tools and solutions we use.

The task gets even more complicated if we need to ensure a hybrid cloud infrastructure security, especially if it also includes private data centers—which we need to secure from scratch.

Cloud Security Enablement Tools

When planning a hybrid cloud security setup, we must first understand which directions to move in, which types of tools we can use, and what we will need to design on our own. The main cloud enablement tools can be grouped by purpose, as follows below.

Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP)  

Comprehensive security solutions designed to protect cloud-native applications across the development lifecycle and runtime environments are known as Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms. CNAPP combines features from various security disciplines, including Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP), and other security controls, to provide an integrated defense for applications developed and deployed in cloud environments.

Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP)

This platform protects workloads on virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions across multi-cloud and hybrid environments. CWPP is a platform for detecting and remediating threats inside the cloud software. They provide system integrity assurance, software check vulnerabilities, network security, memory protection, host-based intrusion prevention, and anti-malware scanning. These platforms work well with multi-cloud infrastructures due to their wide workload coverage.

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)

Managing and securing identities and their entitlements or permissions within cloud environments are the focus of Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management tools. CIEM tools help organizations minimize identity-related risks by ensuring that only authorized users access cloud resources with the principle of least privilege. These tools provide granular visibility into identities, enforce strict access controls, and automate detecting and remedying excessive or unused permissions. CIEM is crucial for preventing security breaches due to mismanaged permissions or identity sprawl in cloud platforms.

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

A set of tools designed to identify and remediate risks due to cloud misconfigurations and non-compliance across cloud environments is referred to as Cloud Security Posture Management. CSPM monitors cloud infrastructure, ensuring configurations align with best practices and compliance requirements.

It provides continuous monitoring and visibility into cloud assets, detects security vulnerabilities, and enables automated remediation, helping organizations enhance their security defense and reduce the potential for data breaches in dynamically changing cloud ecosystems.

Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)

Security tools that enforce security policies between cloud users and services are referred to as Cloud Access Security Brokers. CASBs ensure visibility, compliance, data security, and threat protection across cloud applications. They monitor and control access, secure sensitive data through encryption, identify suspicious activities, and help adhere to regulatory standards. CASBs are essential for organizations using multiple cloud services, offering centralized security management and enhanced cloud security posture. 

Cloud Security Posture Management: Closer Look

CSPM gets a specific place among the other security enablement tools. It enables continuous monitoring, detecting, and remediation of security risks and compliance violations across cloud environments.

This is an important background for the whole security ecosystem to function as expected and be fixed whenever an issue occurs.

Key CSPM Capabilities

Cloud Security Posture Management tools provide a set of essential capabilities, which include:

• Continuous compliance monitoring: They help enterprises comply with industry standards and regulations, such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, and many others, by continuously monitoring cloud configurations, detecting violations, and providing reports that can be necessary when passing audit procedures.

• Centralized security configuration management: They help synchronize the security settings across cloud environments by enabling security policy enforcement and management across cloud environments.

• Risk assessment and remediation: CSPM tools assess the risk levels associated with identified security threats and issues and provide recommendations or automated remediation to resolve them.

• Visibility and reporting: They offer comprehensive visibility into the cloud security posture with detailed reporting and dashboards. The security teams can easily process, review, and use this data as a basis for security improvement planning and tracking.

• Threat detection and response: They continuously monitor for malicious activities and provide alerting, investigation, and response capabilities to address potential threats swiftly.

• Inventory and asset management: They inventory all cloud assets and resources. This allows organizations to keep track of their cloud environment and manage it effectively. This includes timely detecting underutilized, idle, excessive, or, vice versa, overutilized, outdated, and overloaded resources.

• Multi-cloud support: They support multiple cloud platforms (such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as private cloud platforms) to provide centralized management of security posture across various cloud services.

Benefits of CSPM Tools

To sum up the introduction to Cloud Security Posture Management, we could highlight the following set of CSPM solution key benefits:

1. Enhanced Visibility into Cloud Resources

CSPM tools provide comprehensive visibility into cloud environments, helping organizations track and monitor cloud resources, configurations, and data flows.

With a clear view of their entire cloud architecture, organizations can quickly identify cloud misconfigurations or risky practices, preventing breaches before they occur.

2. Reduced Cloud Security Risk

One of the core advantages of CSPM is its ability to identify and mitigate security risks unique to cloud environments.

By continuously scanning cloud configurations and analyzing them against security benchmarks and best practices, CSPM tools reduce the risk of cloud misconfigurations, excessive access policies, and unprotected data storage.

3. Improved Regulatory Compliance Posture

CSPM helps organizations comply with regulatory requirements and industry standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, etc.

Implementing CSPM for Cloud Infrastructures

Implementing Cloud Security Posture Management for cloud infrastructure is a complex task that needs involvement from the corporate security teams and other departments, including IT, development, and management.

In general, this can be split into three major steps:

1. Finding Proper CSPM Tools

When deciding which cloud security posture management tools to use, the team should consider a set of factors, such as:

• Cloud providers: The security tool must support the selected provider to the best possible extent. For multi-cloud environments and those that use private and public cloud infrastructure, finding a tool that will cover all the providers and platforms in the most unified and complete way is essential.

• Necessary features: Think of CSPM features and key capabilities your organization needs. Also, traditional security tools may already cover some requirements, which can be integrated with the new solutions.

• Integrations: The CSPM tools can be integrated with your ecosystem's security toolset and other elements. This may be your CI/CD pipeline, corporate cloud management platforms, reporting systems, etc. Consider these capabilities to make sure you get the best solution.

• Regulatory compliance: Ensure the tool supports compliance with relevant industry standards and regulations (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS). It should offer compliance assessment and reporting capabilities to simplify audits and compliance management.

• Cost and support plans: Different offerings include different support plans and billing options. You can carefully investigate them and match them to your expectations, enterprise lifestyle, infrastructure size, level of cloud adoption, and more to get the best option for your specific case.

2. CSPM Tools Introduction

Once the team responsible decides on the CSPM tools, they must plan their integration into the existing enterprise ecosystem. This process is complicated and often needs cooperation with different teams and departments to provide an effective result.

During the introduction, verifying that the expected functionality can be reached within your specific environment is important. This also includes integrations with internal and third-party tools, such as DevOps, existing security frameworks, alerting systems, etc.

Moreover, at this stage, ensuring the resulting CSPM solution aligns with the organization's overall business objectives and security goals is important.

3. Using CSPM Tools Within Enterprise

Getting everything up and running is, in fact, only the first part of the cloud security posture management journey.

The tool or tools you use will start detecting security issues, performing cloud asset inventory, continuously monitoring the rules and policies, detecting cloud misconfigurations, alerting security teams and other involved parties on the findings, and even suggesting remediation and mitigation steps.

However, this is not enough as is because to enhance the security and compliance posture within the enterprise, the respective actions should be taken by responsible teams. This may need the following global organization changes:

• Policies and governance updates: Review and update existing policies and governance frameworks to include CSPM-specific guidelines and procedures. This may involve defining roles and responsibilities for monitoring cloud posture, setting cloud configuration standards, and establishing incident response protocols for cloud-specific threats.

• Training and awareness program introduction: Implement training and awareness programs to educate employees, particularly those in IT and security teams, about CSPM functionalities and best practices. The training should cover using the CSPM tool effectively, interpreting its findings, and responding to security alerts.

• Building collaboration: Inspire the collaboration between compliance, IT, DevOps, and security teams to ensure a cohesive approach to cloud security. Establish regular meetings and communication channels to discuss CSPM findings, compliance status, and ongoing security issues.

• Establishing audit and reporting mechanisms: Implement structured audit and reporting mechanisms to review the cloud security posture and compliance status regularly. CSPM tool-generated reports can be used to ensure compliance with internal audits and external regulatory requirements.

EPAM Syndicate Rule Engine: New Player in CSPM League

Once the market is full of effective and known cloud security solutions, new players arise, bringing a new touch to the subject.

For example, EPAM Syndicate Rule Engine (SRE) expands the classic CSPM features with new capabilities, from growing Kubernetes and OpenShift support to verification against additional cloud governance best practices and customization of detailed rulesets. It also includes event-driven discovery approach that minimizes the API calls load and allows to pro-actively react on changes in configurations.

Assessing Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and Containers

SRE provides security assessments and compliance detection across major cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and OpenStack. It features an extensive, regularly updated set of rules and benchmarks, offering a unified view across multi-cloud environments.

SRE also assesses cloud-native loads, based on Kubernetes and OpenShift, enhancing security, compliance, and best practices evaluations for container-based applications.

Expanding CSPM Solutions Scope

While it is based on the well-known Cloud Custodian tool, SRE includes a wide range of features highly applicable across diverse cloud environments, such as a unified entry point for compliance, security, and FinOps, customer-specific scanning flows and scopes, targeted security and compliance reporting, sensitive data obfuscation, and wide flexibility in delivery options.

Among the most important features you get, when introducing EPAM Syndicate Rule Engine are:

• Infrastructure inventory: Get detailed information about the resources comprising your infrastructure.

• Cloud infrastructure security assessment: Get your infrastructure scanned for compliance with industry best practices and security standards.

• FinOps scanning: Check if your infrastructure meets the Cloud FinOps best practices and fits the expected financial limits.

• Rules management: Add rules that face the specifics of your organization, selected standards, etc. Check rules performance, and decide which rules are to be run.

• Detailed data for analytics: The scan results are returned as metadata that can be processed by selected tools.

• Scan data analytics: The scan results can be analyzed and transformed into over 20 reports facing different types of users.

• Data obfuscation: The possibility to cover the details of the vulnerable resources during the processing, without exposing the vulnerabilities to third-party tools.