Most organizations now recognize the importance of cloud security, likely due in large part to the sharp uptick in cloud-based data breaches resulting from cloud misconfiguration. Achieving and maintaining the secure configuration of their cloud infrastructure resources—sometimes referred to as Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)—is now a priority for most cloud engineering teams.
Today we released the Fugue Best Practices Framework to help software engineering teams identify and remediate the kinds of dangerous cloud resource misconfigurations used in recent data breaches that aren’t addressed by common compliance frameworks (see A Technical Analysis of the Capital One Cloud Misconfiguration Breach).
Cloud computing platforms like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are powerful because we can program them to respond to our application requirements automatically. Engineers can innovate really fast, spinning resources up and down on demand, and we only pay for what we use.
Just like the challenges of managing large cloud infrastructure operations led to the development of infrastructure as code, ensuring the security and compliance of those environments led to policy as code. Cloud infrastructure environments are simply too vast, complex and dynamic to address with traditional security approaches such as manual audits and checklists.
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) is a category defined by Gartner to address the growing needs of public cloud IaaS and PaaS services to address the challenges of misconfiguration. According to Gartner, nearly all successful attacks on cloud services are the result of customer misconfiguration, mismanagement, and mistakes. A single misconfiguration can expose hundreds of thousands of systems or highly sensitive data to the public internet.
One aspect of cloud computing platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is that it’s easier to create infrastructure resources than it is to destroy them. Even more challenging is maintaining full visibility over all of your cloud resources. Corey Quinn once said, and I’m paraphrasing, “the only way to see everything you have running in your AWS account is to look at your AWS bill.”
Software is eating the world. In the age of cloud computing, developers now own the security posture of your enterprise because the cloud is fully software-defined and programmable. If that scares you, it's because you haven't given your developers the tools to create secure systems. The good news is that you can, but you need to change how you think about security.
In part two of the Cloud Network Security blog series, we will discuss two methods of securing your network within Amazon Web Services: security groups and network access control lists (NACLs). Both resource types act as a virtual firewall to protect your network, and they have some similarities. For example, security groups and NACLs both use sets of inbound and outbound rules to control traffic to and from resources in a VPC.
Network security is critical to operating in the cloud. There are many different ways you can secure your network, but the best approach is to layer multiple methods. The more layers implemented in your security, the harder it is for malicious actors to access your network.
Cloud misconfiguration is the number one cause of data breaches involving public cloud services such as those offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. According to Neil MacDonald at Gartner, “nearly all successful attacks on cloud services are the result of customer misconfiguration, mismanagement and mistakes.”