The cloud industry is constantly growing and the scenario is getting even more sophisticated and competitive with multiple providers meeting the cloud service demand. However, not all solutions address security issues and solve the multiplicity of attacks the market is experiencing. How to achieve this through a cloud-native security strategy?
Cloud adoption has increased at a fast pace in recent years, with more and more customers moving their network infrastructure to cloud environments in order to remain productive and competitive. In fact, this adoption is forecast to reach $620 billion by this year.
Hernan Mella, Sales Engineer at Licencias Online for Check Point, says: “As a consequence of the pandemic, many companies that used to have their infrastructure on-premise now understand that it must be available to users both within the company and remotely”.
However, cloud environments differ significantly from on-premise infrastructure, which means that traditional security tools and approaches do not always work effectively or efficiently in the cloud. Security breaches in the cloud are common, and most breaches are the result of errors related to wrong configurations.
On this point, Check Point stresses the importance of understanding which are the most appropriate solutions for this migration and, above all, how to manage the security of these solutions. In this regard, Hernan mentions that “although risks already existed in the cloud, these have increased, as more clients and a greater number of assets are now in the clouds, giving rise to new problems and threats”.
Among which, he lists:
– The loss of visibility into what customers have in the cloud, especially when they have Multicloud environments;
– The possibility of breaches being left open since it is so easy to upload published assets to the Internet;
– Devops environments have also moved to the cloud for greater flexibility, but, in some cases, without a clear security strategy;
– Threats specifically designed to scan the cloud for breaches.
As a response to this scenario, Mella highlights that CheckPoint Cloudguard offers 5 vectors that target the complete development of both private and public Cloud security. These are:
– Security architecture through virtual FW for public and private cloud: they seek to protect assets in the cloud [whether server farms, DR sites, Lift and Shift etc] as well as to take advantage of the characteristics of the public cloud such as its elasticity or micro-segmentation capacity.
– Public Cloud Posture Management [CSPM]: to achieve complete visibility of the assets, as well as to remediate security issues of public Multicloud environments such as AWS, Azure and GC.
– Appsec standalone: a solution that protects Web Applications or Api on-premise, in private or public clouds.
– AppSec Workload: This aims to protect Web applications, api, but also adds container and serverless protection. [solution that works together with CSPM].
– Intelligence Pro: a threat detection and analytics service for public cloud environments.
Regarding the main new features that the brand is presenting in terms of security for this year, the executive states: “Firstly, the adoption of a protection strategy based on CNAPP, so that customers can have not only a cloud security product but a complete security platform that aims to protect their entire cloud infrastructure”.
At the same time, he adds: “The acquisition of the company Spectral last year is one of the most attractive new additions to the Check Point Cloudguard portfolio. Spectral performs static scans of source code, looking for anomalous configurations and secrets, with a machine learning engine that allows the developer to program securely. It can also be complemented with the Workload Protection solution if you want to have dynamic code protection”.
To conclude, Mella highlights a series of key points for companies to achieve secure cloud environments:
– Maintain broad visibility of the Assets you have in your private clouds and especially in public clouds, as a single misconfigured asset can expose the entire infrastructure.
– Have multi-cloud environments, but always with the ability to manage all providers from a single management and security tool, this will allow greater visibility and, therefore, ease the growth within the same cloud(s).
– Do not neglect code protection in workloads. “We know that the required agility sometimes does not ‘converse’ with security, but you must have a DevSecOps vision and strategy in every application build process.”
