Practical Approaches to Long-Term Cloud-Native Security

There is no shortage of advice out there about how to secure modern, cloud-native workloads. By now, most developers and IT engineers who work with cloud-native deployments have heard all of the mantras about DevSecOps, shift-left security, multi-layer defenses and dynamic baselining (to name just some of the key concepts that are driving IT security conversations these days).

Security Is a Long Game

It’s easy to think of security as something you have to do in real time. After all, threats and attacks usually happen suddenly, and reacting to them quickly is key to preventing serious damage.

If your security strategy centers on finding and remediating threats as they appear, you end up stuck in what is essentially a break/fix mode. You’re constantly reacting, rather than being proactive.

A much more effective security strategy is one that minimizes the threats you face in the first place. That type of strategy requires long-term planning.

Sure, you will always need to be prepared to detect some threats that you didn’t anticipate, and react quickly in the event a breach occurs. No security plan is perfect, and the unexpected will sometimes still happen. But by focusing as much as possible on long-term security solutions that stop most threats from materializing, you end up with a much safer and more reliable security posture.

Building a Long-Term Security Strategy

What does it actually take to implement a security strategy that protects you over the long term? It all boils down to four elements: data, infrastructure, processes and culture.

Data

For many organizations, data stored in the cloud is the workload that poses the greatest risk. It’s the reason why there is a seemingly never-ending stream of headlines about major security breaches that involve the theft of sensitive data stored in the cloud.

Therefore, mitigating threats to data in the cloud is a critical requirement for long-term security. Some best practices in this regard include:

Assess your data: Data security starts with knowing what is in your data, and how sensitive the data is. Data cataloging can help with this process, but so can tools such as Amazon Macie, which helps identify personally identifiable information with cloud-based data.
Access control: Access control frameworks are another crucial line of defense against cloud-based data breaches. Just remember that simply enabling IAM is not enough; you must also audit IAM policies to avoid misconfigurations that could lead to a breach (which was the lesson learned by Capital One, among others).

Infrastructure

These days, we tend to treat infrastructure–meaning the cloud-based and/or on-premise data centers that host workloads–as a relatively generic and interchangeable part of the solution stack. But while it is true that, generally speaking, no one cloud or data center is inherently more secure than another, the way you design your infrastructure plays a key role in your ability to secure modern workloads over the long term.

Best practices on the infrastructure front, for long-term security include:

Immutable infrastructure: Embrace infrastructure platforms, such as ECS or EKS, that make it easy to deploy and update applications in an immutable way. Immutable building-blocks may not work for all use cases, but where possible, they reduce the number of variables and handoffs you have to contend with in order to deploy or update an application (and the more variables and handoffs, the greater the chance of an oversight that will create a security vulnerability).
Access control: While IAM frameworks can help prevent some types of unauthorized access, you can also increase the security of your infrastructure using Access Control Lists. A best practice is to adopt a whitelisting approach that blocks all traffic by default, and allows only explicitly trusted hosts.
Avoiding bloat: Cloud-native infrastructure makes it easy to spin up virtual machines, databases or other infrastructure components that you don’t truly need, and keep them running. Doing so increases your attack surface. For that reason, identifying and shutting down unused infrastructure is critical for ensuring long-term security. It also helps cut cloud costs, but that is another topic.
Parity: In order for developers, ITOps and security teams to be able to communicate and coordinate effectively, they should all be working with the same types of infrastructure environments. Collaboration becomes much more difficult if, for example, you use an on-premise data center for development, then deploy production workloads to the cloud. Avoid this by striving to create parity across your infrastructure whenever possible.

Processes

Processes are the second key ingredient in creating a long-term security plan for cloud-native workloads. Obviously, the processes you use will reflect, in part, your particular workloads and tools. But no matter your situation, your processes should be designed with the following security goals in mind:

Consistency: Your IT organization may consist of different teams, each with different responsibilities and agendas. Nonetheless, to the extent possible, all teams should follow the same procedures when developing, testing, staging and deploying applications. Doing so reduces the chances of variables or oversights that can undermine security. You can help achieve this consistency by creating and enforcing IT governance procedures across the organization.
Shift-left: Processes are the part of your IT operation where shift-left security can have the greatest effect. Shift-left security means making security a priority from the start of the application delivery pipeline. Importantly, however (and this is a point that some organizations overlook), doing shift-left security correctly also means bolstering security operations at later stages of the pipeline, too. Don’t just shift security left and call it a day; aim to make security a primary consideration at all stages of your delivery chain.

Culture

Culture is something that can be difficult to formalize; indeed, if you try to stuff cultural values down your employees’ throats, you risk compromising the whole point of having an organic culture in place. Instead, you want to encourage your team members to naturally embrace values that promote a culture of security. Strategies that can help achieve that include:

Bug bounties: Incentivize your team to look for and address security issues by hosting bug bounties for your organization’s workloads. For this purpose, “bug” should be defined broadly to include not just security bugs within code, but any kind of configuration issue in your infrastructure, tools or applications that could lead to security vulnerabilities. That way, your bug bounties can include not just developers, but all members of the IT organization.
Encourage shared ownership: A culture in which each engineer owns a specific application, infrastructure or process is one that limits transparency and opportunities to address security risks. Strive instead to promote shared ownership of IT assets so each team member knows his or her work may be reviewed by others, which helps to encourage best practices and reduce security issues. In essence, these are part of the values that DevOps and DevSecOps prioritize.

Conclusion

By designing infrastructure, processes and cultural practices that promote security, you put your organization in a position to optimize security over the long term. Planning ahead for security is the only way to escape the break/fix cycle of responding to vulnerabilities as they are discovered, which leaves you always treading water and never pushing the needle. You won’t be able to prevent all security issues, but you can greatly reduce the number that crop up by baking security into your infrastructure, processes and culture.

This sponsored article was written on behalf of Eplexity.

— Chris Tozzi