The pandemic has generated little cloud demand, thanks mainly to organizations scrambling overnight to change their IT architectures and implement more of a hybrid model. This has allowed businesses to more quickly adapt to work from any environment and still maintain normal business operations.
Too many security solutions, too little security
The rush to the cloud has added to the burden on security and operations teams as cloud environments are both diverse and complex. As a result, standard security solutions cannot adequately address these new risks. Organizations will continue to invest in innovative security solutions in the rapidly changing IT world to address emerging risks.
The issue is that many of these are point solutions and are not interconnected, causing an organization’s infrastructure to become more complex and dispersed with each new solution introduced. The result is a fragmented security architecture, which makes administration difficult, increasing risk. In fact, one study showed that 59% of businesses have implemented more than 50 different security tools, with security teams using most of them to view and address typical security events .
The dangers of alert fatigue
Organizations sometimes underestimate the number of security notifications each security solution makes as they proactively improve their solutions to achieve better security coverage and strengthen their defenses. In addition, some security solutions can generate thousands of alerts per day, which many companies lack the resources to organize and manage.
Security teams are forced to manually analyze and review alerts because many notifications lack the context necessary to prioritize their mitigation efforts. This makes it more challenging to manage risk and respond to security demands in a timely manner. And as a result, alert fatigue affects more than 80% of security analysts. Additionally, a recent study found that when their queue grows too full, more than one-third of security analysts end up ignoring security notifications.
One of the primary tasks of CISOs is proactive risk management. And you can control and reduce risk by deploying effective security tools. However, security can be compromised, if security teams are overwhelmed by the amount of data to investigate or ignore alerts entirely. Missing an alert can mean the difference between protecting a company from a serious risk and allowing a massive security breach to affect many users and damage the company’s reputation.
Cloud and security service providers
Cloud service providers (CSPs) continue to make technology investments to protect cloud resources. Additionally, many CSP security services have improved their capacity to provide vulnerability, risk and threat information for compute, database and storage resources. This is encouraging, as 57% of businesses have had trouble finding cloud security experts to handle the complex threat environment.
Organizations can offer their customers a variety of advantages by using a cloud-native CSP security service. These are the most connected and have thorough infrastructure and service integration for that particular cloud environment. As a result, the integration issues that many organizations experience due to a fragmented security architecture are reduced. These services also offer greater coverage because they have access to security events that external security solutions cannot, making it easier to monitor and protect cloud workloads.
Cloud-native security platforms (CNSPs) complement CSP native security services, as well as security mesh products, to provide a multi-layered approach to managing cloud risks. An immediate benefit is that CNSPs can help organizations reduce the number of security tools deployed – an ideal CNSP uses native CSP services whenever possible and provides additional capabilities on top . There is also technology available that can analyze security results from cloud-native security services and CSP security products to provide actionable, context-rich insights for their cloud resources. Actionable alerts enable enterprises to secure the use of diverse public cloud resources such as containers, database services, compute instances and data storage services by of prioritizing action based on the threat level of incidents.
Analysis tools can quantify risk sources and stack-rank depending on their risk score to help security teams prioritize the most important threats. It helps users get the most out of security technologies without overwhelming security staff with a tsunami of security data.
CNSPs use each platform’s APIs to gain visibility into cloud workloads and evaluate and rank resource threats in cloud environments. Analysis tools can quantify risk sources and stack-rank them depending on their risk score to help security teams prioritize the most important concerns. This helps users get the most out of security technologies without burdening security staff with large amounts of frequently generated security data.
By reducing alert fatigue and allowing teams to focus on risks with the greatest potential impact, stack-ranking improves productivity for security teams. Additionally, cloud-native protection platforms help CISOs identify the advantages of deployed security solutions and accelerate the value of cloud-native security controls, which are the easiest to apply by developers. Reports can be generated by CISOs to show the evolution of an organization’s security posture.
CNSPs enable enterprises to build unique policies that can analyze cloud configurations using sophisticated scripting capabilities, in addition to established configuration analysis policies used to control risk on misconfiguration based on standards and best practices.
Streamlining security operations
Some CNSPs can integrate digital workflow products like JIRA and ServiceNow to automate and manage the process for users to adapt to their unique needs, speeding up the mitigation and remediation process for risk insights with high priority.
For improvements that should eventually be implemented in the CI/CD pipeline, organizations can implement stop-gap measures for cloud environments through a cloud security product to guard against attacks before apply permanent remedies. Consistent workflows delivered across multiple clouds help security teams reduce gaps in coverage and boost output.
Bringing everything together
Organizations must adapt their strategies to proactively manage cloud risk. The starting point of handling vulnerabilities, risks and threats for compute, database and storage resources is the use of cloud-native security services that provide comprehensive and effective security coverage. Integration problems that many companies often face can be minimized by using these services, which are also the simplest to implement. Organizations can maximize return on their investments while focusing on high-risk items and proactively manage risk by integrating security alerts from these services and cloud security products with intensive and context-rich alert technologies.
Learn how Fortinet cloud security solutions provide the necessary visibility and control over cloud infrastructures, enabling secure applications and connections from the data center to the cloud.
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