By Mike Buckley | Pre - Sales Consultant at Nettitude

Transforming on-premise environments to the Cloud is not new, many organisations have already been through this process, and those that haven’t or are part way through should understand their strategy for doing so. While each organisation has their own business goals, those goals will loosely align with basic architectural requirements structured within the Cloud environment, whether that be IaaS, PaaS or SaaS or a combination of all. Gartner’s “Top Security and Risk Management Trends” highlighted “Cloud Native” as one of the three architectural building blocks of Cloud security transformation, alongside “SASE” and “Zero Trust”.

What does Cloud Native mean?

What does “Cloud Native” really mean?

Cloud Native is essential a service that has been architected for and in the Cloud services it is there to protect, this may include App Containerisation such as Docker or Kubernetes. Cloud native security built in the Cloud meets the specific security challenges of that environment whether that be DevSecOps, AppSec or integration into CI/CD.

Shared Responsibility Model

The shared responsibility model challenges security models based on implementation, management and administration, traditionally organisations owned all of their IT stack, this is not the case in the Cloud. Organisations must be aware that when transitioning to Cloud services they are responsible for defining and implementing some of these policies and controls, while some may fall to the Cloud providers themselves. Customer misconfiguration is a common reason for Cloud security breaches, possibly because the security teams believe that security is the Cloud provider's responsibility, when in fact, the shared responsibility model means this is not the case.

Cloud Maturity Assessment

Understanding your organisations Cloud security maturity with a point in time assessment both provides assurance on the current posture and provides evidence to roadmap to a more mature stance through defined migration steps to move the organisation to a Cloud-centric security model.

Nettitude, in partnership with Check Point, are offering a free Cloud Maturity Assessment to identify your risks on public Cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure and GCP.

This assessment will supply you with: 

• A full security report auditing over 100 compliance checks and configurations within your public Cloud instance
• Comprehensive network assessment to find misconfigurations, along with best practices for remediation
• Complete inventory of assets report
• Prioritisation of failed tests by severity

Continuous Monitoring

While a point in time assessment is useful to understand current posture and establish a roadmap, it is not a suitable tool for monitoring public Cloud continuously. What is required is a continuous posture assessment tool.

Check Point’s CloudGuard provides network security policy management and automation for public Cloud environment across providers, regions and accounts.

CloudGuard is suitable for public or private Cloud and scales from a very small number of configurations up to hundreds or thousands of instances. The CloudGuard flexible security tools enable compliance while aiming to reduce configuration complexity and therefore errors and gaps in security. Read-only monitoring mode through to fully managed enables either alerting when policy breaches are detected through to full rollback of the change that initiated the breach alert.

CloudGuard includes:

Posture Management

Assess the compliance of Cloud environments using built-in or custom compliance test rulesets

Asset Management

Manage protected assets in the Cloud through the use of security reports and tools

Network Security

Visualisation of network security policies for security groups and control access to Cloud assets

Identity and Access Management for AWS

Control of AWS (IAM) users permissions, thereby hardening the AWS console and preventing unauthorised changes to access permissions

As ever, security is a consideration in all IT projects, Cloud is no different, whether you’re in the midst of a transformation or have completed one. The use of traditional tools that may or may not have attempted to transition themselves into the Cloud is resulting in gaps in Cloud security or inefficient use of Cloud applications. Using Cloud native security tool sets seems obvious but vendors with heavy investment in traditional technologies and perhaps with the lack of agility to transform themselves is challenging. As ever, organisations must continually evaluate whether their security toolsets match their requirements now, and in the future, change has already happened, security must move with those changes and Cloud native is one of the results of that change.