Can Cloud Security Be Easier Than Complex?

Last updated at Tue, 16 May 2023 20:02:44 GMT

A bigger piece of the meal

For those in the United States and certain parts of the world, it’s time for end-of-year holidays. That means lots and lots of big meals to celebrate these special occasions. Each dish created becomes part of that larger meal.  

Another important event that occurs around this time each year is budget planning for next year. Cloud security is one dish in the larger meal of the company’s entire budget, and you can bet that meal will be eaten quickly. Fighting for scraps of budget at the end of the meal won’t do. It’s important to identify exactly what you need so that you can get organized and get funding that will best secure cloud operations.  

The patchwork of tools that make up an effective cloud security solution shouldn’t be too complex or become siloed. In fact, if it can come from one provider offering a suite of out-of-the box solutions that operate from one platform, that would make things even simpler. And in the process of searching out that package of solutions – ideally from that single, trusted provider – and customizing it to your needs, you’ve gone through a similar process of preparing the dish that gets added to the larger meal.    

Impossible to secure?

In the new Rapid7 eBook 13 Tips for Overcoming the Cybersecurity Talent Shortage, we detail how Gartner® says the unique nature of cloud-native applications makes them impossible to secure without a complex set of overlapping tools spanning development and production. Admittedly, this sounds pretty dire. However, there are solutions – like InsightCloudSec from Rapid7 – that incorporate multiple capabilities into one, unified platform in order to remove the previously mentioned complexity. Let’s take a look at some of those different parts that can make up your ideal solution:

• Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM): Detects and reports on issues ranging from cloud misconfigurations to security settings.

Learn more about Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

• Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM): Provides identity and access controls to reduce excessive permissions and streamline LPA controls across dynamic cloud environments.

Learn more about Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)

• Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP): Protects the unique capabilities or workloads running in a cloud instance.  

Learn more about Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP)

• Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP): Provides instrumental data context across CSPM and CWPP archetypes to better protect workloads.

Learn more about Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP)

The ultimate goal would be to secure the entire lifecycle of your cloud-native applications, regularly scanning code throughout development and runtime. This ultimately enables a holistic security process that uncovers and remediates issues quickly and can be automated according to your burgeoning best practices.

What does easier cloud security look like?

Those best practices that will surface over time will tell you exactly what easier cloud security looks like for your organization. Customizing practices specific to your operations is technically the hard part, with the easier part to follow. Once automation protocols have been implemented, those protective and reactive controls help you innovate at the speed enabled by cloud environments. But even in the hard part of cloud setup, there are vendors providing platforms for unified solutions to make it easier out of the box.

InsightCloudSec from Rapid7

InsightCloudSec helps teams secure even the most complex cloud environments by surfacing and applying context to risk signals to understand and prioritize them based on potential impact. The solution significantly reduces mean time to respond (MTTR) by utilizing real-time detections and native automation to detect and remediate misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, policy violations, and overly-permissive roles.

• Get agentless, real-time visibility into every resource and service running across your cloud environment.
  
• Simplify cloud risk assessment with rich contextual insight into every layer of your environment.
  
• Enforce organizational standards without human intervention with native, no-code automation.
  

More efficient cloud security solutions create happier teams. And that helps you to gain savings in multiple areas like time, money, and satisfaction.

More resources

Whatever your ultimate cloud operational needs are or whatever your multi-cloud environment looks like, you can now learn more about tactics to help you make your case for more – or any – cloud security at your company. Plus, get a handy checklist to use when looking into a potential solution. Get started now with the 2022 edition of The Complete Cloud Security Buyer’s Guide from Rapid7. You can also read the previous entry in this blog series here.