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Amit Tailor , Director , Systems Engineering , Palo Alto Networks
risks in production massively . However , for it to be successful , security teams need to clearly understand how their organisation builds and deploys code and applications in the cloud . Knowing this , they can identify where it is least disruptive to inject security into a CI / CD pipeline .
• Eliminating blind spots is crucial and can be achieved through ensuring comprehensive visibility over cloud environments . This starts with discovering cloud assets and identifying and fixing misconfigurations and vulnerabilities . But there also needs to be constant vigilance to track strange or suspicious behaviours that suggest a security compromise . Visibility is continuous and near real time , so a team can answer security questions relating to who , what , when and where .
• Research keeps on telling us there remains too many unpatched vulnerabilities in cloud environments but a crusade to fix these will not be enough to prevent threats . This means applying threat prevention tactics that block zero-day attacks and when there is a breach prevent lateral movement by hackers . Calculate permissions across your cloud resources to follow best practices for least-privilege access and wrap prevention solutions around all mission critical applications .
• Avoid falling into the trap of getting a new piece of security technology for each new immediate use case . This increases the sprawl of security tools that
don ’ t interoperate that well , which burden rather than empower security teams and make it harder to see what is really going on . A better approach is to step back and review an organisation ’ s cloud adoption goals over the coming years to find solutions that can truly meet priorities both today and in the future .
• Over-tooling is a growing problem in cloud cybersecurity . Consider tool consolidation to progress all the above steps . For security teams this can help automate correlation and tackle the most important security issues across the application life cycle . It should also lead to faster identification and resolution of security issues and alerts , slashing the time needed to respond to threats . Unifying data and security controls onto one platform helps align an organisation ’ s cloud journey with security . A common platform brings together security and developer teams on a common goal of building , improving and running successful cloud environments .
Migrating to public cloud providers offers organisations not only agility and scalability , but also better security than on-premises data centres can replicate . Modern security features do a great job in securing cloud workloads but only if implemented correctly and managed well .
The challenges of cloud cybersecurity are arising from how the speed of adoption is hitting up against the increasing complexity of managing hybrid and multi-cloud technology stacks . Some organisations are finding it hard to keep pace and inadvertently introducing security weaknesses . The good news is that modern approaches to cloud cybersecurity can remedy these issues and be an enabler for organisations to thrive in their chosen cloud environments . p
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