More and more companies are moving critical apps, data and IT resources to cloud computing platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. While the cloud offers amazing flexibility and cost-savings, it also introduces new cybersecurity risks businesses must address.
The experts at Hillstone Networks say that’s where cloud workload protection platforms (CWPPs) come in. These security tools offer protection against emerging cyber threats for all your cloud assets.
Understanding Cloud Security Risks
When using public cloud services, your business no longer owns or has direct control over the underlying physical infrastructure and networks that run your workloads. The cloud provider is responsible for securing the foundational cloud fabric itself.
Nevertheless, customers are still fully accountable for properly configuring their leased cloud resources and protecting anything they build, install or store on top of that shared responsibility model. Misconfiguration, lack of visibility, insider threats, and supply chain attacks can all create dangerous vulnerabilities.
The risks do not stop there either. Cloud environments are incredibly dynamic, with workloads constantly spinning up, moving across zones/regions, and auto-scaling based on demand, unlike traditional static data centers. This elasticity makes it extremely difficult to consistently enforce security policies using legacy on-premises tools.
Why Traditional Security Falls Short
Most businesses mistakenly assume their existing on-premises security controls like firewalls, IPS/IDS and antivirus will be sufficient for public cloud protection. But these standalone tools simply weren’t designed to operate in the cloud-native paradigm.
For one, they lack the required depth of integration, analytics, and automation to dynamically track and secure temporary, auto-scaling cloud asset inventories in real-time.
Additionally, traditional security stack fragmentation prevents unified visibility across multi-cloud deployments, limiting IT’s ability to holistically manage risk and compliance. Using disparate point solutions also drives up cost and complexity.
How CWPP Strengthens Cloud Defenses
A robust cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) is purpose-built to solve these unique cloud security challenges. It serves as a centralized control plane for discovering, visualizing, and protecting all your distributed cloud assets across AWS, Azure, Google and other hosted environments.
Leading CWPP solutions integrate seamlessly with the cloud provider’s APIs and telemetry sources to continuously monitor changes and enforce consistent guardrails. As new instances spin up or configuration changes are made, CWPP automatically maps assets, assesses posture, and deploys the appropriate protections.
CWPP Capabilities and Benefits
At its core, CWPP encompasses a broad range of essential cloud security capabilities, including:
- Vulnerability Management: Automatically discovers and prioritizes risks across all cloud resources, containers, serverless functions, etc. Provides detailed remediation guidance.
- Compliance Assurance: Continuously audits and enforces adherence to hundreds of regulatory benchmarks and best practices (CIS, NIST, HIPAA, PCI, etc.).
- Workload Hardening: Ensures that all cloud assets are properly configured based on your custom security policies and guardrails from the start. Maintains this “golden state”.
- Threat Detection: Analyzes activities and network traffic to identify compromised assets, malware, crypto-miners, lateral movement, and other threats.
- Cloud Network Firewall: Provides granular application control, IPS/IDS, DLP inspection and micro-segmentation across multi-cloud environments.
- Activity Monitoring: Logs and audits all administrative user, API and control plane activities for forensics and incident investigation.
- Automated Remediation: In addition to alerting, CWPP enables automated responses like quarantining infected workloads, killing malicious processes, and more.
Rather than trying to shoehorn legacy tools into cloud use cases, CWPP empowers organizations with purpose-built, full lifecycle protection tightly integrated with their multi-cloud fabric.
Conclusion
As cloud adoption continues exploding across the business world, getting a grip on cloud security with an advanced CWPP becomes crucial. Do not let your critical cloud workloads and data remain unguarded; unlock the full benefits of the cloud while keeping threats at bay.
