With cloud-native applications, teams are adopting a software development approach that leverages cloud-native infrastructure services, such as containers, serverless security, and platform as a service (PaaS).
These new delivery models offer numerous advantages for businesses. Among these is cloud native automation, which allows teams to deliver software more quickly and efficiently.
Automated Vulnerability Scanning
Automated vulnerability scanning is essential for organizations that use cloud resources. It also helps them ensure their web applications are protected against attacks.
Cloud-native environments bring a fresh set of security challenges that take more work to address with traditional IT security practices. However, they offer portability and flexibility to help teams maintain secure environments during development and deployment.
In addition, they allow DevOps to apply security fixes quickly and effectively across multiple environments. The right cloud native security platform can provide full-stack protection for workloads, hosts, and containers.
To safeguard cloud settings, CNAPPs integrate features of cloud security posture management (CSPM) solutions, cloud access security broker (CASB) tools, and cloud workload protection platforms (CWPPs). Configs and workloads are scanned during development and secured throughout usage.
Threat Detection & Response
A cloud native security platform enables teams to reliably and accurately detect network threats. They can also ensure high data security at an affordable cost.
Threat detection is a crucial part of any security strategy. It is significant for enterprises rushing to adopt new computing environments, including cloud-native apps.
One common way that bad actors attack applications is by targeting vulnerable dependencies and libraries. Using a software composition analysis tool like OWASP dependency-check is an excellent way to identify vulnerabilities in these components.
Another way that threats can impact cloud-native apps is by exploiting errors in the CI/CD pipelines that create container images. For example, these errors can lead to cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities and SQL injection attacks.
Static code analysis tools often overlook these errors, making them a significant vulnerability for cloud-native applications. To combat these vulnerabilities, organizations must implement a cloud native security strategy that moves security down the application code level and prioritizes it earlier in the software development lifecycle.
Compliance
A cloud native security platform can help organizations comply with industry regulations and compliance mandates. It enables them to monitor and mitigate threats by providing visibility of all resources and activities across multiple cloud environments.
It helps them to spot threatening patterns and incidents at an early stage before they turn into a real threats. It also makes identifying sensitive data easier and restricts access per its sensitivity.
It can also protect organizations from various privacy-related risks, including identity theft. These attacks are increasing yearly, and widespread digitization means much private user information is at stake.
A CNSP can also help organizations maintain an effective security posture by automating misconfiguration remediation. These solutions can detect unauthorized actions and notify security teams of these misconfigurations so they can be remedied quickly and close any gaps in security posture.
Real-Time Monitoring & Response
Cloud-native systems empower organizations to build, deploy, and run scalable workloads in dynamic environments. These frameworks support agile development and help teams apply security fixes quickly. However, these environments bring a fresh set of security challenges that traditional IT security tools cannot solve.
Real-time monitoring is critical to protecting your cloud infrastructure from vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. It is why it’s so important to choose a cloud native security platform that provides continuous CI/CD testing and visibility into your environment.
A CNSP can also deliver automatic remediation to address potential threats as they arise, regardless of whether you are using public, private, or hybrid clouds. It helps reduce your organization’s risk and meet compliance requirements.
Unlike conventional, agent-based security methods, a CNSP consolidates intelligence from cloud feeds, configurations, and identities in a single data model. It allows teams to understand the entire context of their risks and take immediate action.
Scalability
The ability to scale and rapidly adapt to changing environments is one of the primary reasons organizations choose to deploy cloud native infrastructure. However, this also introduces a fresh set of security challenges that can’t be quickly addressed with traditional IT security practices and tools.
As a result, companies adopting DevOps and cloud-native architecture must ensure their security is baked into the software development life cycle (SDLC). It means having checkpoints at every stage of the SDLC, from application build to deployment.
These checks should be automated and provide early warning of any security vulnerabilities or threats that can impact the production of an application. In addition, they should ensure that vulnerable code is fixed at the appropriate time.
Organizations must deploy an automated security platform that empowers the development team to deliver a design that meets their business objectives and adheres to cloud native principles. In addition, they need to acknowledge that as more and more of our infrastructure gets described during application development, the developers’ team assumes responsibility for ensuring the code is secure.
Integrations
Using a cloud native security platform (CNSP) for your security needs offers many benefits. For one, it allows you to unify your security across various compute options, multi-cloud environments, and the application development lifecycle.
CNSPs also deliver deeper integrations with the cloud vendors themselves, which can provide more excellent data security coverage than third-party tools.
To further improve security, cloud-native security tools use powerful key-based encryption algorithms to prevent unwanted users from intercepting data streams as they move to and from the cloud or accessing data files once they are stored in Cloud storage. This practice has helped highly data-sensitive industries like banking adopt cloud-based infrastructures to protect sensitive customer information.
A CNSP also provides detective controls that monitor applications, servers, open ports, and any intrusive user behavior that may threaten the organization’s security posture. It helps prevent malicious activity from affecting the overall cloud security posture by blocking access to compromised ports, blocklisting the IP address, and stopping the execution of malicious programs.
