How to Secure Cloud-Native Applications in Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Environments?

Introduction 

Approximately 86% of organizations have already adopted a multi-cloud strategy, utilizing services from various service providers like AWS security, Azure security, and GCP. The increased adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud environments ushered in a new era of innovation, empowering businesses to rapidly scale, increase agility, and collaboration, and enhance redundancy while mitigating the risk of downtime.  

However, they introduce a new range of security and compliance risks, operational complexities, control over their data’s whereabouts, and visibility gaps across CSPs that might be addressed in SOCs. Hence, implementing Cloud-native SOC that comprehensively secures modern applications regardless of their deployment in the public cloud on-premises, or at the edge.  

In this blog post, we will explore the common security challenges in hybrid and multi-cloud environments and how Cloud-native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) resolves the underlying challenges, offering unified visibility and enhanced compliance.  

Challenges with Traditional SOCs: 

As businesses are increasingly adopting hybrid cloud models, it presents formidable challenges such as increased attack surface, compliance issues, and data protection, Hence, ensuring consistent security policies, and addressing compliance across multiple environments is critical. Moreover, cybercriminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and even the smallest security gap may leave the whole infrastructure vulnerable.  

 Traditional SOCs face limitations in hybrid and multi-cloud environments due to: 

• Delayed response times: Handling large volumes of alerts and incidents manually can delay threat detection and response, resulting in longer periods of vulnerability. 

• Alert fatigue: SOC analysts are often overwhelmed with excessive alerts, many of which are false positives, leading to overlooked critical threats. 

• False positives: Manual monitoring often results in a higher percentage of false alerts, reducing overall efficiency and effectiveness. 

• Increased Complexity Across Multi-Cloud Vendors: As organizations are utilizing multi-cloud strategies from various vendors like AWS, Azure, and GCP, it presents unprecedented challenges for SOCs to enforce consistent policies and manage security across all environments due to its diverse security model.  

• Lack of Unified Visibility: SOCs often struggle to obtain a comprehensive view of the entire cloud environment due to its diverse security tools and platforms, leaving blind spots where threats can go undetected. Provide unified visibility for SecOps and DevOps teams. 

• Misconfigurations: 90%of data breaches in the cloud happen due to misconfigured APIs. Given the dynamic and flexible nature of cloud setup, misconfigurations often leave an open port or fail to set the correct permission, leading to exposing critical data to the world.  

• Data Governance and Compliance: Ensuring data governance and compliance is another challenge in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. With data spread across multiple platforms and jurisdictions, SOCs must navigate complex compliance requirements like GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA. 

• Increased Attack Surface: Hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures inherently come with an increased attack surface. With more endpoints, APIs, and third-party integrations, organizations face a greater risk of breaches and attacks. 

• Permission Impacts & Identities – Securing human and workload identity access across multiple clouds is also a significant challenge due to the rapid growth in identities and bloated permissions. 

What is a Cloud-Native SOC? 

A Cloud-Native SOC is designed to provide the scalability, automation, and real-time monitoring capabilities needed to manage the complexities of hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures. With a Cloud-Native SOC, organizations can respond faster to threats, gain comprehensive visibility across their environments, and implement automated responses to reduce manual workloads. It is designed to scale seamlessly across public, private, and on-prem infrastructures, making it an ideal fit for dynamic cloud environments. 

What is CNAPP (cloud-native application protection platform)? 

CNAPP is a unified cloud-native platform, originally coined by Gartner, emphasizing the need to secure every phase of cloud-native applications and infrastructure from development to production. This end-to-end complete lifecycle approach simplifies monitoring, detecting, and remediating potential cloud vulnerabilities across cloud-native applications. As it encompasses multiple tools and solutions into a single software platform, it empowers the DevSecOps team to protect their business-critical workloads and streamline operations.  

Why do we need to adopt CNAPP Security? 

The implementation of the CNAPP security platform empowers DevSecOps teams to address visibility and integration complexities while ensuring secure software development, posture management, and breach prevention across multi-cloud environments. 

• Unified Visibility and Centralized Management 

By integrating with cloud-native security tools like AWS CloudTrail, Azure Security Center, and Kubernetes security modules, CNAPP offers enhanced visibility and granular details across cloud infrastructure, configurations, workloads, technology stacks, and identities. This allows security teams to monitor security events from a single dashboard, reducing the complexity of managing multiple security tools. 

• Tighter Controls: 

Misconfigurations of cloud workloads, containers, and Kubernetes are the most common challenges of enterprise applications. CNAPP is the combined security solution that consolidates cloud infrastructure provisioning, workload scanning, containers, and Kubernetes enabling organizations to proactively monitor, detect, and remediate security and compliance risks due to misconfigurations. 

The Role of CNAPP in Addressing Cloud-Native Security Challenges 

• Comprehensive Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) 

CSPM is an integral part of the CNAPP platform, offering automated governance through continuous monitoring and management of cloud security postures across multi-cloud environments in real time. CSPM can detect open ports, exposed APIs, or misconfigured firewalls, allowing for swift remediation. 

• Shift-Left Security for DevOps 

CNAPPs integrate security into the development pipeline, allowing security teams to identify and fix vulnerabilities in code before deployment. This approach, known as shift-left security, helps prevent security issues from being introduced during development. By scanning Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) templates, CNAPPs ensure secure configurations from the start. 

• Cloud Service Network Security (CSNS) 

Traditional perimeter-based network defenses are ineffective with the modern cloud-native security challenges. CSNS is a critical aspect of the CNAPP that helps to achieve the same level of security monitoring and threat prevention in cloud-native environments like on-premises environments without the traditional on-premises perimeter. It leverages multiple techniques and tools to secure traffic across public, private, and hybrid cloud infrastructures such as Next-generation Firewall (NGFW), load balances, DoS protection, Web Application and API protection (WAAP), and SSL/TLS inspection. 

• Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) 

CWPP provides real-time protection for applications running in containers, VMs, and serverless environments. They can detect and prevent runtime threats like zero-day exploits and fileless malware, ensuring that workloads remain secure even in complex cloud environments. 

• Automation and AI-Driven Threat Detection 

CNAPPs leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify anomalies and predict potential threats. Automated incident response capabilities help reduce response times, ensuring swift action in the event of an attack. 

Best Practices for Implementing CNAPP Security 

To maximize the benefits of CNAPP, organizations should consider the following best practices: 

1. Align Security with DevOps: Security should be integrated into the DevOps pipeline to ensure that security checks happen early in the development process. 
2. Implement Zero Trust Security: Organizations should adopt a zero-trust security model, ensuring that all users and devices are continuously authenticated and authorized. 
3. Continuously Monitor and Test: Regular testing and continuous monitoring of the cloud environment are crucial for maintaining strong security postures. 
4. Leverage Automation: Use automation for routine security tasks, such as vulnerability scanning and incident response, to reduce human error and improve efficiency. 

Conclusion:  

Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud security can often be a complex endeavor as security teams must protect every layer of security. Hence, adopting a shift left approach to security with the CNAPP solutions empower security and DevOps teams to integrate security checks and controls on the DevOps pipeline. Integrating the CNAPP platform across the entire application life cycle empowers businesses to secure their multi-cloud infrastructure effectively. 

With over two decades of experience in implementing robust cybersecurity services, iLink Digital helps organizations fortify their cloud-native security by adopting a multilayered approach, enabling them to safeguard their critical assets with enhanced compliance standards throughout the application lifecycle.