Cloud Security

How to Ensure You Have Complete Visibility to Cyber Threats - The primary foundation of a cloud security strategy is closing the visibility gap. Complete visibility of a cloud environment informs those cybersecurity measures involving risk assessment and management, policy governance, threat hunting, and compliance assurance.

However, a lot of companies are unable, or simply refuse, to effectively meet the cloud visibility challenge. It is one of the most vexing cybersecurity tasks that organizations must address to secure their cloud environments. Eliminating the cloud visibility gap is essential.

Why Cloud Visibility is Essential

Achieving comprehensive cloud visibility requires deep and broad monitoring of historical security incidents and the state of current configurations. The essence of realizing total cloud visibility is to:

• Identify in-scope security events within the cloud infrastructure: Lacking visibility of user workloads and behavior prevents companies from establishing whether the deployed security and governance policies are effective. Cloud visibility is a crucial component to protect cloud systems from unauthorized access and attacks.
• Understand the current state of IT assets: Full cloud visibility provides searchable contextual details regarding the condition of all existing assets. Inadequate visibility of in-scope assets means there is no context and, therefore, concepts like anomaly detection or compliance assurance may lack meaning and validity.
• Maintain a complete inventory of essential and non-essential assets: With full visibility, it becomes easier to maintain an up-to-date list for all assets requiring different protection levels.
  
  

Cloud Visibility Challenges

Cloud security teams face multiple challenges in maintaining a context-rich and centralized security operations (SecOps) view of abnormal behaviors within an enterprise's cloud environment. The visibility gap may widen as a company registers more growth and various individuals deploy increasingly diverse technologies and processes spanning multiple cloud services, geographic locations, accounts and providers.

Additionally, self-service deployments enable organizations to become more effective but at the expense of providing and monitoring cloud infrastructure centrally. Cloud technologies have caused the nature of infrastructure deployments to be more dynamic, distributed, extensive and temporary. Subsequently, traditional security procedures and tools have become incapable of keeping up with cloud speed and scale. The past few years have also seen deployed automated technologies outpace security procedures in various ways, such as maturity, features and adoption.

Moreover, security operations have historically focused on preventing attacks instead of detecting them or defining the controls for protecting a cloud perimeter. A prevention-based approach often fails while focusing on cybersecurity controls is inadequate given the dynamic and logical cloud environment structure.

Lastly, legacy cloud security tools, including virtual and physical firewalls, are inadequate for identifying and preventing attacks in dynamic and distributed cloud systems. Since cloud innovations are changing rapidly, and enterprises deploy more diverse and distributed technologies, it can be challenging to find the right procedure and security solutions that provide deep visibility in all cloud deployment environments.

How to Get Complete Cloud Visibility to Cyber Threats

Most enterprises do not implement a multi-cloud visibility service due to a false sense of having achieved robust cloud security. For example, some businesses rely on traditional firewalls and anti-malware products to protect against cloud attacks, which may contain certain limitations where they can't prevent sophisticated threats. A false sense of cloud security often causes companies to ignore the essence of complete cloud visibility.

One of the most effective ways of gaining full cloud visibility is deploying agnostic cloud management solutions.Managed eXtended Detection & Response (MXDR) vendors provide managed cloud visibility platforms, some of which use artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect and respond to cloud security threats. Implementing such platforms allows businesses to apply customized visibility controls and deploying granular agents to protect their cloud environment from multiple cloud security threats.

Furthermore, MXDR providers deliver solutions that can be configured to notify pertinent stakeholders of various security problems. Real-time alerts of cyber threats ensure timely risk management and mitigation, which is critical to eliminating cloud security threats. A cloud visibility management platform can also be used to initiate functions for enforcing the deployed cloud security policies. For instance, they enable system administrators to configure cloud applications that encrypt sensitive cloud information automatically, block unauthorized users from deploying cloud resources outside of working hours, or revoke resource access if there are instances of suspicious user activities.

The following cloud security best practices can assist in achieving greater cloud visibility:

1. Continuous visibility: While the on-demand, elasticity, and automated nature of current cloud infrastructures is convenient, it can be challenging to understand every security aspect of a cloud environment. However, monitoring all deployed assets and users authorized to access the resources can help manage the attack surface and eliminate cyber threats more effectively.
2. Exposure management: Exposure management means increasing the context of your cloud visibility. After gaining transparency and visibility, it becomes simple to manage cyber threats known to exist within the cloud environment.
3. Data protection: Protecting cloud data means securing information stored or processed through virtualized cloud servers (data at rest) and data in motion. The recommended strategy for protecting cloud data is prioritizing it according to sensitivity in order to identify which data assets require higher security levels.
4. Anticipate cyber threats: It is important to accept that investing in the most secure cybersecurity services does not protect your organization entirely. In this regard, organizations should anticipate attacks and breaches and then implement mechanisms, such as increasing their cloud visibility as much as possible, that permit them to react immediately once a threat is identified.
   
   

Getting Started with Securus360

Every business needs full cloud visibility to protect itself adequately from both the current and yet-to-be-deployed (unknown) cyber threats. Securus360 provides the best coverage for all multi-operating and multi-cloud environments to help you gain complete visibility of your deployed cloud infrastructures. The Securus360 cloud visibility solutions are engineered to ensure cloud security at the highest levels. Components, including governance and compliance, work together to protect cloud applications and services from nefarious activities. Since cloud technologies are becoming more and more vital to running a business, our platform was developed from the ground up to be based on artificial intelligence and machine learning which along with our human cybersecurity analysts, provide real-time identification and response to cloud security threats.