It is a multi-cloud world, and the nature of multi-cloud environments makes it extremely challenging for enterprises to ensure security. Firstly, from a user access perspective, a multi-cloud environment makes it challenging to make access control secure. Maintaining multiple user access systems and ensuring a consistent access policy is a huge challenge for every administrator. Another common security issue faced by enterprises is misconfiguration of security settings. Misconfiguration happens when default cloud credentials are left unchanged or if excessive permissions are given.
Though cloud misconfiguration is one of the most common errors exploited by cybercriminals, there are other significant threats. The Cloud Security Alliance, for example, lists, lack of cloud architecture and security; insufficient identity, credential, access, and key management; account hijacking; insider threats; insecure interfaces and APIs; weak control plane; Limited Cloud Usage Visibility and Abuse and Nefarious Use of Cloud Services, as other significant threats. Many enterprises mistakenly assume that the same security settings that have worked for them on- the premise will work in the cloud environment too. It is also common for many enterprises to leave the default credential settings unchanged. But as Gartner has rightly pointed out, "Through 2022, at least 95% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.” This means that customers are responsible for securing the databases or applications that they host on the cloud.
How automation can help?
Given the complexity of cloud environments and the challenges associated with securing a multi-cloud environment, it is imperative for enterprises to seek out ways to secure effective ways of securing cloud deployments. This is where automation can be of great advantage. Cloud automation helps in eliminating any human errors that may have occurred, which has resulted in causing the cloud-based infrastructure to be insecure. For example, as changes are made across clouds, a cloud automation platform can monitor the changes to the configurations and check if they adhere to the required compliance and security best practices. Cloud automation platforms can also help in automatically configuring different components of the cloud security ecosystem such as networks, access points, or firewalls. This helps in significantly eliminating many of the manual errors that are common in a multi-cloud environment.
In an environment where enterprises face a huge amount of risks from zero-day vulnerabilities, automation can help them patch and update servers quickly. Patching activities can be done automatically on a huge number of servers without any manual intervention. This helps administrators in quickly patching servers if a serious vulnerability has been discovered. Automation can also help in providing a centralized view across multiple cloud environments. Enterprises can use centralized dashboards provided by service providers to stay compliant and enforce permissions based on their roles. Identity and access management is one of the major challenges in a cloud-based environment. This is where automation can be of huge advantage and provide a lot of value by reducing security risks. Similarly, automation can help in analyzing the network continuously for any suspicious or malicious behavior, which can be extremely useful for preventing attacks. Using automated security tools, enterprises can also run bots that continuously monitor the complete cloud ecosystem for any policy violations and auto-alerting enterprises for taking remedial actions.
In Summary, cloud security automation can raise the bar for security. From ensuring standardization in applying consistent policies to improve efficiencies by enabling even smaller security teams to scan and test multiple cloud instances and servers for security vulnerabilities and patching them, cloud security automation can give enterprises a big advantage in ensuring security.
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