Strategies for Protecting Multi-Cloud Environments

🚨CISA & NSA release Crucial Guide on Network Segmentation and Encryption in Cloud Environments🚨 In response to the evolving requirements of cloud security, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) recently released a comprehensive Cybersecurity Information Sheet (CSI): "Implement Network Segmentation and Encryption in Cloud Environments." This document provides detailed recommendations to enhance the security posture of organizations operating within cloud infrastructures (that probably means you). Key Takeaways Include: 🔐 Network Encryption: The document underscores the importance of encrypting data in transit as a defense mechanism against unauthorized data access. 🌐 Secure Client Connections: Establishing secure connections to cloud services is fundamental. 🔎 Caution on Traffic Mirroring: While recognizing the benefits of traffic mirroring for network analysis and threat detection, the guidance cautions against potential misuse that could lead to data exfiltration and advises careful monitoring of this feature. 🛡️ Network Segmentation: Stressed as a foundational security principle, network segmentation is recommended to isolate and contain malicious activities, thereby reducing the impact of any breach. This collaboration between NSA and CISA provides actionable recommendations for organizations to strengthen their cloud security practices. The emphasis is on strategically implementing network segmentation and end-to-end encryption to secure cloud environments effectively. Information security leaders are encouraged to review this guidance to understand better the measures necessary to protect cloud-based assets. Implementing these recommendations will contribute to a more secure, resilient, and compliant cloud infrastructure. Access the complete guidance provided by the NSA and CISA to fully understand these recommendations and their application to your organization’s cloud security strategy. 📚 Read CISA & NSA's complete guidance here: https://lnkd.in/eeVXqMSv #cloudcomputing #technology #informationsecurity #innovation #cybersecurity

Cloud Security Posture Management: The Key to Preventing Cloud Breaches Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) is a critical security practice for organizations that use cloud computing. CSPM tools help organizations identify and remediate cloud misconfigurations, which are one of the leading causes of cloud security breaches. CSPM also helps organizations enforce compliance with industry regulations and standards. CSPM can help organizations to: 🎯Identify and remediate misconfigurations 🎯Mitigate risk 🎯Continuously improve security posture 🎯Save time and money 🎯Give executives visibility into security posture Let's look into some of the explanations why CSPM holds so much importance within the organization: ✅Visibility and control: CSPM tools provide organizations with visibility into their cloud environments, including the configuration of cloud resources, the permissions of users and groups, and the traffic flowing through the environment. ✅Risk mitigation: CSPM helps organizations mitigate risk by identifying and remediating misconfigurations before they can be exploited by attackers. ✅Compliance enforcement: CSPM tools can help organizations enforce compliance with industry regulations and standards by automatically scanning cloud environments for deviations from approved configurations. ✅Real-time monitoring: CSPM tools provide real-time monitoring of cloud environments, allowing organizations to detect and respond to misconfigurations and vulnerabilities quickly. ✅Multi-cloud support: CSPM tools can be used to manage security across multiple cloud providers, which can help organizations to reduce the complexity of managing security in a multi-cloud environment. ✅Threat detection: CSPM tools can be used to detect suspicious activity in cloud environments, which can help organizations to identify and respond to potential security threats. ✅Continuous improvement: CSPM can help organizations to continuously improve their security posture by identifying and remediating recurring misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. This can help organizations to reduce their risk of future security incidents. ✅Efficiency and productivity: CSPM can help organizations to save time and money by automating security tasks. This can free up security teams to focus on more strategic initiatives. ✅Executive visibility: CSPM tools can provide reports and dashboards that give executives visibility into the security posture of cloud environments. To learn more about CSPM and how it can help you to ensure cloud compliance, please visit our website or contact us today. ♻️Repost if you find it valuable! 🔔Follow for more insights on cloud computing! #cloudcomputing #devops #devsecops

It is quite common for me to see Azure environments where resources have been spun up without any underlying architecture, governance or security design. Maybe they started out as a temporary solution or test and suddenly became relied upon and built on top of. This opens the organization up to a lot of vulnerabilities and risk, be it from a security perspective or cost perspective... or both! Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a fantastic tool to start bringing some order to the chaos, it also has some free capabilities to get started with, see them later in this post! Here are some of the key capabilities it has to offer: AI Security Posture Management (AI-SPM): Provides granular visibility into all workloads, including AI workloads, identifying vulnerabilities across VMs, Storage Accounts, AI models, SDKs, and datasets. For example, a financial services company mitigated vulnerabilities in their AI-driven fraud detection systems using AI-SPM. Enhanced Threat Protection: Integrates with Azure OpenAI Service to protect against jailbreak attempts and data breaches. A healthcare provider used this to secure patient data in their AI diagnostic tools. Multicloud Threat Protection: Not using Azure? no problem! - This tool supports Amazon RDS and Kubernetes security, enhancing threat detection and response across AWS, Azure, and GCP. A global retailer implemented these features to secure their e-commerce platforms. Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Insights: Enhances security with Checkov integration, streamlining DevSecOps processes for a software development firm. Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM): Optimizes permissions management, reducing attack surfaces for a tech startup. API Security Testing: Supports Bright Security and StackHawk, ensuring API security throughout the development lifecycle. A logistics company used these tools to secure sensitive shipment data. Free Capabilities Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers the foundational Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) capabilities for free, including continuous security assessments, security recommendations, and the Microsoft cloud security benchmark across Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. Check out the links in the comments to learn more! #CloudSecurity #AI #MicrosoftDefender #CyberSecurity #Multicloud #CNAPP #TechNews

When will we stop being surprised by preventable security breaches in major cloud services? What am I talking about? Last year's Microsoft Exchange Online breach, perpetrated by the threat actor Storm-0558, demonstrated a glaring oversight in cloud security. A compromised authentication key from 2016—never meant to be active—gave unauthorized access to over 500 key email accounts, including those of high-ranking U.S. officials. This breach was not just a failure of technology but a failure of governance and process. How do we move away from breaches like this? Zero trust. For Cloud Service Providers (CSPs): Zero trust could have significantly limited the breach's scope. Under zero trust, every access request is verified regardless of origin (trust zones don’t exist). This means continuous validation of all access requests to resources and services, effectively minimizing the "blast radius" of incidents like compromised keys. Implementing more granular access controls and more frequent key rotations, aligned with zero-trust principles, could have prevented unauthorized access, even if a key were compromised. For Consumers of Cloud Services: Zero trust shifts the security paradigm from a perimeter-based to a resource-based model. Consumers implementing zero trust don't just rely on the cloud provider's security; they also continuously authenticate and authorize their own user and device access based on adaptive policies. We talk about zero trust, but we still have much work to do to reap its benefits. #zerotrust #cybersecurity #cloudsecurity Dr. Chase Cunningham John Kindervag Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency

Key Secrets for Multicloud Success From “An Insider’s Guide to Cloud Computing” With voiceover and commentary by the author. Now that we understand the challenges of deploying and operating a multicloud, and some of the approaches that will likely overcome these challenges, let’s dig deeper into specific approaches to a multicloud deployment that will optimize its use. The goal is to leverage a multicloud deployment using approaches and technologies that minimize risk and cost and maximize the return of value back to the business. Everyone will eventually move to a multicloud deployment, and most have no idea how to do this in an optimized way. In other words, the deployment won’t be successful. Again, the concepts presented in this chapter are perhaps the most important in this book. Applied correctly, they will lead to successful multicloud deployments. Remember that most enterprises won’t increase their operations budget to support a multicloud. The key themes are to not replicate operational services for each cloud provider, which is the way teams typically approach multicloud today. That architecture won’t scale, and you will just make the complexity worse. Eventually, you’ll run into complexity issues such as security misconfigurations that lead to breaches or outages due to systems that aren’t proactively monitored. If these issues go unresolved, chances are good that your multicloud deployment will be considered a failure in the eyes of the business, or more trouble than the cost to deploy it. So, do not replicate operational processes such as security, operations, data integration, governance, and other systems within each cloud. This replication creates excess complexity. Here are some additional basic tenets to follow: Consolidate operationally oriented services so they work across clouds, not within a single cloud. This usually includes operations, security, and governance that you want to span all clouds in your multicloud deployment. Because it can include anything a multicloud leverages, it works across all clouds within a multicloud deployment. Leverage technologies and architectures that support abstraction and automation. This removes most of the complexity by abstracting native cloud resources and services to view and manage those services via common mechanisms. For instance, there should be one way to view cloud storage that could map down to 20–25 different native instances of cloud storage. Because humans do not need to deal with differences in native cross-cloud operations (security, governance, and so on), abstraction and automation avoid excess complexity. Isolate volatility to accommodate growth and changes, such as adding and removing public cloud providers, or adding and removing specific services. When possible, place volatility into a configurable domain (see Figure 6-10) where major or minor clouds and cloud services can be added or …

Recently, Google Cloud, Orca Security and CrowdStrike published reports that together provide an excellent view of the state of cloud security in 2024. Reading them alongside each other paints a grim picture. However, many of the cloud threats mentioned in the report can be mitigated with effective measures that SAP uses to protect its large multi-cloud estate. For instance, the Google Cloud report showed that more than half of all security incidents analyzed in their dataset started with initial access to weak or no password protected cloud resources through public-facing SSH or RDP. That threat can be eliminated with cloud guardrails such as SAP put in place. In the article linked below I discuss the three reports, and make four recommendations you can implement on your cloud landscape that are low on cost and high on security benefit, by making the cloud platform your ally. https://lnkd.in/gB3E9M-4 This is complemented beautifully by an article co-authored by my colleague Amos Wendorff and AWS's Joachim Aumann where they go into more detail how SAP rolls out "Secure by Default" guardrails on AWS. https://lnkd.in/g5gYHkgv Those clouds have silver linings. Take advantage of the capabilities of the cloud control plane to protect against common cloud threats. #cloudsecurity #cybersecurity #sap

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security Cyber Safety Review Board is focusing on the vital issue of cloud-based identity and authentication, and it couldn't come at a more crucial time. Today, nearly every enterprise uses multiple cloud platforms, but ensuring security in this complex landscape is a shared responsibility. Cloud providers offer tools, but it's up to us to secure our data. The complexity of multi-cloud can lead to vulnerabilities. Misconfigurations, insufficient monitoring, and staff shortages are common pitfalls. Gartner predicts that 99% of cloud failures by 2025 will be the user's fault. So, what's the solution? 🔍 Consider third-party solutions for better vulnerability detection and access management. 🔍 Regular internal audits are vital to ensure minimum necessary permissions. 🔍 Invest in training and a strong security culture to defend against threats and maintain secure configurations. The cloud is here to stay, but it's time to secure it confidently. The DHS review highlights the importance of identity and authentication in our cloud security strategies. Worth a read: https://lnkd.in/e3ZUyxrA #CloudSecurity #CyberSafety #DigitalTransformation