Cloud Data Security: Implementing Smarter Cloud Security

The trend of mass migration to the cloud brings benefits like lower operating costs, easier deployability, and the flexibility of an elastic environment. However, it’s crucial to understand that the responsibility to secure your cloud infrastructure still falls on your organization.

Cloud providers allow organizations to take advantage of their infrastructure, resulting in a shared model for security. As tempting as it is to leave security up to your provider, cloud security is a shared responsibility. The line of responsibility is clearly drawn out within the SOC2 report of each cloud provider.

Keeping Up with the Hybrid Cloud

While a hybrid approach offers the best of both worlds, organizations must determine their data’s security state while juggling regulatory compliance demands and issues around visibility within the public cloud. The same security and compliance requirements for on premise assets are required for assets managed in the cloud. To complicate matters further, security teams must figure out what their cloud providers’ built in security covers—and where they need to pick up the slack.

Security techniques haven’t evolved fast enough to keep up with the speed and demand of cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Basic security principles remain the same, but their application is different in this faced paced environment. There are two main services consumed by organizations from these cloud providers: infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS).

While there are some security services built into these, the responsibility for managing configuration and vulnerability risks falls on the customer. While there are some vendors who handle security in the cloud, very few can monitor multi cloud, on premise and hybrid environments. Whether your organization chooses to consume IaaS or PaaS from one or more cloud vendors, Tripwire is uniquely positioned to help secure your organization.

Take Control of the Migration Process

As you move your development from traditional on premise data centers to a hybrid or cloud only system, you need to figure out how to ensure this migration is done right. But only 21 percent of organizations include security teams in the cloud provider selection process, according to the Ponemon Institute.

To get back in the driver’s seat and secure your cloud migration, use Tripwire solutions to verify that the infrastructure being deployed in the cloud is done so in accordance with your organization’s risk posture and security hardening guidelines. Cybersecurity challenges are different in the cloud, and the best way to overcome them is to apply basic security controls with an automated zero trust model.

Tripwire Axon with Full Automation

Tripwire Axon® is a multiservice, scalable, high performance data collection platform. It was designed to solve the challenges associated with accurate and complete security and compliance visibility across a broad range of systems. It optimizes the collection, aggregation and application of data, and enables users to collect endpoint data once and reuse it across multiple security and compliance controls. Tripwire Axon agents can be installed using your provisioning tool—such as Puppet, Chef or Ansible—of choice. When alive, they call home (the console) to self register and determine what needs to be checked. They then run these checks and provide feedback to the console for analysis. The console can then send an action to either pass/ continue, fail/restart, or alert an administrator so that an appropriate response is taken.

Bringing Change Management to the Cloud

While the operational process should deploy each fresh image correctly, they should still be verified. As infrastructure is deployed in the cloud, Tripwire solutions can verify the configuration of the images as well as ensure that the vulnerability risk is at an acceptable level. If the image remains persistent in the cloud, Tripwire Enterprise can also monitor for changes, as changes on images should happen further left in the pipeline, not in production. Therefore, when a change is detected, Tripwire Enterprise can send a message to deprovision and spin up a new image, or, depending on the severity of the change and use case of the image, an alert can be sent to the appropriate team. While monitoring the configuration of the cloud account or platform in use, Tripwire Enterprise can either alert or take an action if a change is detected. Using APIs, an automated process can take place depending on the severity of the change detected. For example, if a storage blob or bucket becomes open to the public, a high severity incident process can be initiated.

Using a Zero Trust Model

This guidance should be considered from within a zero trust model, meaning that user access should be highly limited. The only account that should be making changes is the provisioning tool. Additionally, organizations should consider automating many facets of their model in order to improve efficacy. So how can organizations meet these cloud security best practices?

Fortunately, this is where dedicated security solutions can help. Cloud fluent security solutions can be deployed in a zero trust model to dynamically tell you how a system is configured, what the vulnerability risk is, and if something changed that shouldn’t have—all of this without manual user intervention.