The Use Of Cloud Computing Services Is Increasing Day By Day. That’s Why Security Experts Are Looking For Solutions To Overcome Cloud Security Problems.

Secure Cloud Infrastructure, With the rapid growth of cloud services and the emergence of new methods of communication, attackers are preparing to launch complex attacks against cloud environments.

Therefore, organizational security teams must develop precise solutions, controls, and policies to protect cloud infrastructure operations processes so that hackers fail to access sensitive organizational information.

Since assigned controls in the field of cloud, solution security can play an important role in the success or failure of the organization to use this environment and the security of business activities, so in this article, we went to review these controls. The tips you will learn in this article will help you to implement cloud environments successfully.

Important and effective areas of cloud security

Typically, it is challenging for any organization to consider all cloud security controls when deploying cloud-based workflows. Increasing the level of security to the highest possible level has its own problems assuming the occurrence of cyber-attacks because it reduces the performance and speed of access to services. On the other hand, lowering the security level to the lowest level creates an unreliable infrastructure.

That is why it is important to have an appropriate level of security in dealing with incident response plans. On the other hand, focusing too much on one area and ignoring other areas makes business processes vulnerable. Therefore, all actions must be in perfect balance with each other. That’s why you need to identify key areas when developing a cloud-to-maximum cloud security strategy.

Reduce attack levels

Determining the level of attack and trying to reduce or neutralize it helps maintain cloud security and reduces the severity of attacks on infrastructure. The most important controls available to achieve this goal are network segregation, patch management, technical vulnerability management, and cloud storage scanning. In addition, security policies must be designed and implemented in the first stage of the application lifecycle based on DevSecOpS rules.

To be more precise, you need to define the right infrastructure for the applications deployed in the cloud environment and apply continuous monitoring and optimization to maintain the performance of the infrastructure.

This process is too extensive for the security team to handle alone, so Dumps engineers, network designers, and the monitoring team who access the environment and use the services must take on some tasks. Despite all these efforts, it may still not be possible to repel cyber-attacks completely. So a more accurate approach is to focus on detecting and responding to potential intrusions to minimize the destructive effects of attacks.

Detection of intrusion and attack

The shorter the detection time, the less damage to the organization. Therefore, an effective solution should minimize the time interval between attack and detection. The most important thing to remember is that attacks that are not dangerous at first glance may be a warning sign for other attacks that are unlikely to be detected or occur in the coming days.

For example, the increase in traffic volume and new processes in the computing infrastructure signal hackers’ attempts to infiltrate network systems through an infected virtual machine or repositories. To achieve accurate detection capability, you must use services working at the network level and computing resources. In addition, because cyber threats are on the rise, the organization’s threat knowledge base needs to be updated with the latest information.

The proper response to attacks

When securing cloud infrastructure, you must minimize the time between detection and full recovery through appropriate policies to respond to events. In addition, you need to understand the difference between real threats and false alarms and distinguish between them. To do this, you must conduct thorough research and studies on attack vectors and carefully read the reports generated or compiled by the tools.

Use features such as activity automation scripts and WebHooks that integrate with alerts and can be used as the first line of defence. The more accurately you know about attacks and how to deal with them, the more efficiently you formulate security policies.

Cloud security controls

It is important to pay attention to access control and identity management, data protection, and application security in all security strategies. Different security controls can be categorized into different groups. The most important are network security, patching process management, runtime protection mechanisms, selecting appropriate CWPP solutions, and utilizing the SIEM mechanism. In the following, we will describe each of these components.

Network Security

Unlike intra-organizational networks, cloud networks are software-centric (SDN) and have more flexibility than traditional networks and mechanisms such as network segmentation. Adherence to points such as simple segregation using virtual networks, segmentation of reservoir workload based on defined policies, and segmentation of different levels of workload help control and manage transmission traffic and provide a more precise boundary for implementing centralized security policies.

For example, boundaries and policies defined at the network layer help protect against attacks based on anonymous IP addresses or attacks targeting vulnerable ports. However, more complex attacks at the network layer level require the separation of application components and policies related to these boundaries (demarcation between different sections).

Web Application Firewalls Cloud-based applications are vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Therefore, more advanced protection layers should define for them. To do this, you can use web-based firewalls provided to companies by cloud service providers and provide comprehensive protection at the application layer (Application Layer) against known vulnerabilities and exploits.

Web-based application firewalls (WAFs) can analyze and filter HTTP traffic between clients and web servers if necessary to protect web applications from attacks such as SQL code injection, web-based scripting, and other types of attacks. Web-based firewalls have the ability to integrate with a variety of services that provide data entry through the web.

Protection against DDoS attacks

Distributed Service Deprivation (DDoS) attacks take hyper-centric applications out of orbit within seconds. Therefore, a defence mechanism is necessary to counter these attacks. It is best to start with the infrastructure itself and apply the necessary protections all the way to the application layer at the end. Today, all cloud service providers use security features and mechanisms to reduce the consequences of these attacks.

Configuring protection solutions against distributed denial-of-service attacks is critical to IaaS and PaaS cloud services. The desirable features of such services are the ability to set and automate attack mitigation policies and analytical services that provide comprehensive information about the attack.

Cloud Security Status Management (CSPM)

The wrong configuration of services, human errors and unprofessional management are the main factors in the success of cyberattacks against cloud services. CSPM solutions continuously monitor the installation and configuration of cloud solutions to identify errors and provide accurate reports to experts. This control policy provides a high-level overview of the security environment of the cloud environment.

In addition to aligning default security policies with legal standards, a standard CSPM solution should allow organizations to define security policies tailored to the business requirements of their business. CSPM solutions can alert users to violations of an organization’s security policies, suggest appropriate corrective actions, or implement them automatically. An ideal CSPM solution should cover cloud security, including virtual machines, networks, data storage media, PaaS services, and server-free and repository environments.

The ability to continuously assess risks, comply with legal requirements, and report on them plays an important role in reducing the attack level and allows CSPM to be an important component of cloud security strategy.

Vulnerability management

In parallel with the continuous growth of Micro Services in the cloud, vulnerability detection and management tools should protect from container environments by utilizing features such as scanning reservoirs at runtime, integration with continuous integration mechanism (CD / CI), etc. . Under optimal conditions, these tools should continuously identify vulnerabilities, prepare application reports, generate results in the form of application dashboards, and automatically modify vulnerabilities if necessary.

Having a patch management process for Linux and Windows environments reduces the severity of attacks on these operating systems. In addition, organizations can use cloud-specific security patch management solutions or third-party tools for this purpose. Access to comprehensive reports on identified vulnerabilities and actions taken to terminate them and installed security patches will help you gain an accurate view of the history of cloud security status. Do not forget that this strategy helps a lot during security audits.

Cloud Workload Protection (CWPP) Infrastructure

Today, cyber attackers are interested in cloud environments and sophisticated attacks against these environments, so it is important to use defined and accurate metrics to assess the status of enterprise systems, and the analysis process tends to be a volume-focused approach. The strategy used to detect and report attacks must be comprehensive enough.

This is where cloud workload protection (CWPP) infrastructures come in handy with a workflow-based security approach. CWPP solutions designing to monitor various computing resources such as virtual machines, repositories, etc., and provide accurate information about the security situation. Applications can deploy at the level of hybrid or multi-cloud environments, and CWPP solutions provide monitoring and protection for these environments.

Applications of CWPP include intrusion/threat detection, system integrity assurance, service security, application control, and intra-memory protection. The fact is that signature anti-malware tools for cloud workflows, especially those hosted on Linux, are obsolete. At the same time, CWPP can use advanced detection solutions and controls that perform better than traditional approaches.

As mentioned, the CWPP threat detection strategy performs better than traditional approaches. It can evaluate all processes running on computing resources and detect the execution of any malicious or unauthorized code. Common security solutions focus on threat detection in the Windows environment, but CWPP solutions effectively manage and detect Linux threats.

Container security

Cloud storage security includes the protection of storage tanks and coordinating infrastructure (orchestration). The most powerful option in this area is Cobrantis. Most cloud services offer a type of managed Cobrantis service, but companies that need access to a control panel can implement their Cobrantis clusters. For Cubrentis clusters and reservoirs, compliance with standards should follow, and any violations reported.

Any malicious activity at the reservoir or host levels, such as high-level access to the repository (managerial access), access to application programming interfaces from suspicious sources, and detection of suspicious activity, must be reported promptly and security vulnerabilities analyzed. Typically, these features are offered as part of the features of a CWPP solution.

In addition, the ability to scan repository images can help reduce the severity of attacks by identifying vulnerabilities in the image before transferring it to the repository registry. To achieve this, you can use repository tools provided by your cloud service provider to monitor and scan images.

Event Management and Security Information (SIEM)

SIEM solutions have special capabilities that are suitable for intra-organizational environments and cloud infrastructure. These solutions detect and analyze cyber threats in a short amount of time.

Ideally, these solutions should integrate with different data sources and provide automation based on application programming interfaces to perform corrective tasks. Most SIEM tools have good imaging capabilities that help better monitor the recurrence rate of malicious events, data anomalies, network intrusion, and more.

Other threat detection capabilities

Organizations should not rely on CWPP solutions and should use the mechanisms for monitoring repositories proposed by service providers for advanced detection. These services should cover different application layers, computing resources, and data sources and support the security layer, including cloud control panel, network traffic, and key management solutions. Identifying suspicious activities and reports, monitoring user activities, and evaluating user behaviour patterns can help identify suspicious behaviours.

Security reports available

All successful cloud services companies have comprehensive reporting solutions. Control panel and data panel reports should analyze to ensure that security solutions are at the appropriate level. These reports include service activities, network traffic, IAM reports, data entry and exit reports, and items of great research importance.

last word

Achieving the security of cloud environments is a continuous path that must simultaneously address business activities’ growth. The controls mentioned in this article play an important role in configuring cloud security and help network and security administrators speed up the process of securing cloud workflows.