5 Steps to Improve Your Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Protection | RedSeal

In 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on how and where we do business. For many businesses, “where” became a cloud — all at once. This rapid adoption of the cloud - in most cases, multiple clouds - has rapidly escalated security concerns. All of a sudden, enterprises had new cloud security requirements that they needed to understand and deploy without wasting time learning. The complexity continued to grow, and this created new security challenges with potentially costly implications. These include:

• Data leak. The unauthorized movement of sensitive data from within an enterprise to an out-of-bounds setting can be accidental or deliberate. Data breaches are often discovered after days, weeks, or months and can lead to loss of brand reputation, loss of customer confidence and fines.
• Ransomware - businesses can pay thousands to millions of dollars to access encrypted data and systems to restore access. If they refuse to pay, businesses can lose days or weeks of revenue trying to restore their systems, and the company's sensitive data is likely to be freely available on the Internet.
• Failure to comply with enterprise security policies, not complying with mandatory regulations (PCI-DSS, CMMC, HIPAA) or voluntary cybersecurity systems (NIST, GDPR) can incur costly fines and potential shutdowns that will restrict ability to do business. Customer relationships can be undermined by insider stuffing (based on security audits) - that safety is not a priority in this company.
• Remote work in team or lack of staff - DevOps is always knows in the internal infrastructure of an enterprise, and many teams acknowledge their lack of expertise in cloud (outernal) platform security. Cloud security practices should encourage active collaboration that uses both internal and external sources of information storage and processing.

To maintain cloud security and reduce, and sometimes eliminate, the impact of these serious security issues, enterprises need a proven cybersecurity framework to address these challenges directly.
 

Steps to harden your cloud security

Cloud environments are dynamic and constantly evolving. These 5 steps provide a proven foundation for improving your enterprise's cloud security with a technological approach, even in a multi-cloud environment.

1. Visualize / maintain an accurate inventory of computer, data storage, and networking peripheries.
   Security teams often do not have visyalization for multi-cloud and hybrid environments. Cloud environments are often managed from different consoles in tabular form. Security teams need to understand the controls that filter traffic, including cloud controls (Network Security Groups and NACL) and third-party infrastructure (SASE, SD-WAN, and third-party firewalls). A single solution that provides a detailed visual representation of the multicloud environment is essential.
2. Constant monitoring of open resources.
   It is important to understand which cloud resources are publicly available on the Internet. Unintentional access of resources to the Internet is the main reason for hacking cloud storage. This includes any cloud-based network resource, even AWS S3 or AWS EC2. Security teams should be able to easily identify open resources and then provide permission fix options that include changes to security groups or firewall policy.
3. Continuously review your compliance with security industry best practices.
   There are many industry platforms that can be used to validate cloud security. Security teams must continually review best practices and correct results quickly to rule out misconfigurations and avoid excessive permissions.
4. Policy validation - intra / inter-cloud segmentation and corporate requirements.
   Many security groups create segmentation policies to minimize the handling of attacks. Examples would be sharding one cloud provider from another (AWS cannot interoperate with Azure), or sharding access between accounts in the same CSP. Both segmentation and corporate policies must be constantly monitored for violations and provide detailed information to quickly correct the situation.
5. Conduct comprehensive vulnerability prioritization.
   All vulnerability management solutions provide a severity rating, but more comprehensive prioritization can occur by determining which vulnerabilities in the cloud are available to the Internet (including the subsequent impact of those vulnerabilities).

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RedSeal implements the above and many other multi-cloud security methodologies. The Redseal solution contains the following functionality: visualization/inventory, discovery, industry best practices, policy review, and vulnerability prioritization. These 5 steps can help security teams who have had to act quickly and without warning during this challenging time.