Making Security and Compliance a Priority in the Cloud

Global data breaches hit 1,500 in 2018, based on public disclosures, making security and compliance in the cloud a top priority for enterprises.

While cloud computing can quickly expand your capabilities and help you achieve your business goals, it also introduces complexity to securing these new computing environments. 

Despite the complexity, many enterprises now consider cloud infrastructure the default hosting strategy for new application development projects. According to Forrester, nearly 60% of North American businesses now rely on cloud on public cloud platforms–five times the percentage of five years ago.

For IT organizations typically managing costs across all application hosting, public cloud, or IaaS environments give them the ability to use the entire hosting environment to host many applications and enable them to optimize budgets, time and resources using a single approach.

While cloud computing offers agility, flexibility and cost savings, as enterprises move more data, systems and services to the cloud, they are increasing their cloud attack service. Often unknowingly exposing themselves to potential security and compliance challenges. Additionally, the cloud’s interconnected nature makes it possible for an attacker who identifies a single vulnerability to easily and quickly compromise a number of your systems.

Top reasons maintaining security and compliance is a challenge in public cloud:

• The  cloud is faster and more complex: Cloud infrastructure is abstract, complex and much faster, and can be easily set up by almost anyone with the ability to pay for the service.
  • The scale and speed of IaaS environments are bigger and much faster compared to traditional IT environments, and as a virtual hosting solution public cloud computing is somewhat more abstract. Instead of being accessible through physical hardware, all servers, software and networks are hosted off premise. It’s a real-time, virtual environment hosted between several different servers simultaneously.
  • As the number of assets expands exponentially within these environments, one of the greatest challenges facing security teams is the ability to maintain effective, real-time visibility into public cloud assets.
• IT is now decentralized: Development and Ops teams are distributed and often autonomous, which means data, systems and services are no longer under the control of centralized IT.
  • This presents significant risks to the security of sensitive data and the ability of the organization to maintain compliance according to regulations and corporate policies. You need a way to effectively identify and mitigate these risks, while still enabling all the benefits of the cloud and ensuring you can achieve your business objectives.
• Faster rates of change: DevOps + Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery + IaaS means extremely fast rates of change.
  • Within IaaS environments you will have to keep up with a growing inventory of 10s of 1000s of assets and potential issues to resolve, something impossible to maintain manually.

Security and Compliance Critical in the Cloud

With the enormous potential for data breaches, having a strong cloud security program along with an effective cloud security solution in place is more critical than ever. You cannot mitigate data security and compliance risks in public cloud environments by using traditional approaches. Security professionals must now utilize proven security controls and best practices as the most effective way to protect sensitive data and meet compliance requirements.

As a security practitioner, you likely have a requirement for tracking fast-moving IaaS assets, their potential threats and exposures, as well as related events pertaining to security and compliance. How to resolve them all at high scale and high speed is more important than ever.

Below are things to look for in a solution when trying to improve security and compliance in the cloud. Choose a solution that enables:

• A proactive approach
• Continuous security and compliance
• Securing the data (Shared Responsibility Model)

If you’re hosting critical applications in public cloud infrastructure, security and compliance visibility is critical. Changes happen often and fast, so automation to ensure risk visibility is critical. Without it, you might be in for some very unpleasant surprises.

Halo Cloud Secure is an automated public cloud security solution that delivers comprehensive visibility, protection, and continuous compliance monitoring to reduce cyber risk.

In Datamation’s 2019 side-by-side product-comparison from its Top 8 Cloud Security Solution Providers, CloudPassage Halo was the only cloud security solution noted for its regulatory security and compliance policy use cases.

Download our product brief  to learn more about how Halo Cloud Secure can help you gain the critical comprehensive security and compliance visibility you need to effectively monitor and protect your IaaS environment.