It would be great if there were a way to guarantee against cloud security breaches by simply deploying a certain tool — just like it’d be nice if you could become a millionaire or live forever by following the tips promoted by “one weird trick” clickbait content.
The reality, of course, is that everything worth having in life — including a secure cloud environment — requires hard work. Businesses must invest the time and energy necessary to optimize their cloud security tools.
Here’s a look at what doing the hard work in cloud security looks like, along with tips on how to streamline cybersecurity processes.
Why Cloud Security Tools Alone Aren’t Enough
Today’s cybersecurity teams have amazing tools available to them.
Common Cloud Cybersecurity Practices
- Security Incident and Event Management.
- Cloud Security Posture Management.
- Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management.
These solutions automatically scan cloud environments and flag configurations that deviate from the thousands of security best practices. Modern cloud security solutions do much of the work required to secure complex environments at scale.
But there are many things that these solutions can’t do, such as understand the unique needs of a particular business, tell teams exactly how to react to security alerts, identify false-positive and negative alerts with total accuracy or ensure that different stakeholder groups communicate effectively.
This is why using cloud security tools to maximum effect requires some hard work.
7 Manual Practices to Improve Cloud Security
Businesses should invest in efforts like the following to make cloud environments and resources as secure as possible.
1. Determine What to Monitor and Scan
Cloud security tools are great at scanning resources and identifying most types of security risks. But they have no way of knowing which resources your business actually needs to secure. You have to do the work of deciding which resources you want to protect.
To some extent, cloud security tools can identify resources automatically. You can point them at your cloud environment and they’ll find the cloud servers, databases and so on that you have running in them.
But they may not be able to peer deeply enough to discover, for example, individual applications running on cloud servers, or know which types of data you consider sensitive. You need to provide this guidance by generating configurations that identify what matters in your environment.
2. Decide Which Security Policies to Apply
Similarly, cloud security tools have no way of knowing exactly which security policies you want to enforce. Even if they begin applying certain policies out-of-the-box, those policies may not be ideal for your industry or tech attack.
You need to configure the tools so they enforce relevant policies. At the same time, avoid implementing irrelevant policies that will increase your alert volume without providing meaningful protection.
3. Customize Alerts Based on Business Context
The more context you can build into alerts, the easier it will be for your teams to react to the alerts efficiently. For example, including details about how severe a given type of alert is allows staff to determine which alerts to prioritize.
This, too, is an area where cloud security tools might provide some default or generic alert contextualization abilities, but where customizing alerts based on your business’s unique needs changes the game entirely.
4. Testing Security Policies
Just because a security policy comes built into a cloud security tool doesn’t mean it will always do what it’s supposed to. It might result in false positives or negatives, or it may not work at all due to configuration issues.
For this reason, testing alerts is critical. Teams should compare alerts generated by their tools to lists of known issues within their systems to ensure that their alerts are not overlooking important risks, while also reviewing alerting data to look for false-positive notifications that will needlessly distract security teams.
5. Avoid Policy and Alert Redundancies
In many cases, businesses deploy multiple cloud security tools. This makes sense if different tools excel at addressing different types of risks. In situations where tools overlap, however, they might generate redundant alerts, which can be another source of distraction for teams.
For example, imagine that you configure security monitoring and alerting using a service offered by your cloud service provider, while also deploying a third-party cloud security monitoring tool. It’s likely that the solutions will alert on some of the same issues.
To avoid redundancy, you either need to turn off certain types of alerts in one tool or integrate the tools so that each one is aware of the alerts the other is producing and will ignore issues that the other tool has already flagged.
6. Keep Security Configurations Up-to-Date
Cloud environments change constantly, and the security policies that were effective for your business yesterday may no longer make sense today. This means that teams must routinely audit and update security configurations in response to changing needs.
Security tools can help by automatically providing access to policies and alerts that support new types of services or configurations, but you’ll still need to customize them based on unique business context.
7. Facilitate Team Collaboration and Communication
While security tools can help identify risks, fixing them typically requires coordination between multiple stakeholders, like application developers (who can fix security vulnerabilities in source code), information technology engineers (who can redeploy applications after they have been patched) and compliance teams (who can provide guidance on which security rules to enforce to meet compliance mandates).
Businesses must invest in communication channels and cultural standards that bring the various stakeholders together.
By investing upfront in this work, businesses save a great deal of time and effort in the long run. When you reduce the effectiveness and accuracy of cloud security policies, you reduce the risk of a security breach, which can become a tremendous drain on resources (not to mention a serious source of financial and reputational harm for the business).
Embrace the inevitability of having to do more than a little hard work to implement a security strategy that delivers the greatest level of protection possible.
