Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Organizations are moving workloads to the cloud to help keep pace with the speed of innovation. However, too often this is done without a proper plan in place to ensure that their security doesn’t fall behind. The potential financial and reputational damage, as well as the risk of lost data from a breach is massive, and that makes proper planning crucial.

What are cloud-native applications? According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the term “cloud native” describes systems that are specifically designed to help build and run scalable applications in all cloud environments, including public, private, and hybrid clouds. Cloud-native applications use the attributes of cloud architecture in ways that legacy systems can’t. They don’t need any onsite computing infrastructure and can scale quickly to meet demand.

Elaine Feeney is a member of the Netskope Network Visionaries advisory group. For any business, speed matters a lot. Speed of service is key to happy customers because any delays that users experience directly impact the success of the organization. Security processing that causes delays for the customers or employees has negative business impacts. Now more than ever, security controls have become a board-level priority due to elevating risks.

More organizations than ever run on Infrastructure-as-Code cloud environments. While migration brings unparalleled scale and flexibility advantages, there are also unique security and ops issues many don’t foresee. So what are the major IaC ops and security vulnerabilities? Configuration drift. Cloud config drift isn’t a niche concern. Both global blue-chips and local SMEs have harnessed Coded Infrastructure.

At CrowdStrike, we combine cloud scale with machine learning expertise to improve the efficacy of our machine learning models. One method for achieving that involves scanning massive numbers of files that we may not even have in our sample collections before we release our machine learning models. This prerelease scan allows us to maximize the efficacy of our machine learning models while minimizing negative impact of new or updated model releases.

Enterprises today want real-time business insights to make decisions that improve operational efficiency and customer engagement and present newer revenue opportunities. However, the promise of the data-driven business falls short due to gaps in data management. These gaps exist because data in the modern enterprise doesn’t exist only behind firewalls and within organizational premises.

One of the selling points of cloud computing is the ability to quickly spin up new machines as needed. Unfortunately, this means that cloud environments grow very complex, very quickly – and manually updating configuration files to add new instances gets really old, really fast. It’s easy to make a mistake, which inhibits productivity and causes security issues, especially when accessing machines remotely.

Either through human error or intentionally, configuration changes in the cloud may suddenly increase your attack surface. AWS Route 53 is an example of a service that needs to be continuously tracked for risky changes. As the first line of defense of our cloud, it is necessary to secure Amazon Route 53 and monitor risky configuration changes to avoid unwanted surprises. As you probably know, AWS Route 53 is of course a very popular DNS service offered by AWS, with millions of top-level domains.

Like their larger counterparts, small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are moving swiftly to migrate IT workloads to the cloud, hoping to slash operating costs, eliminate technical debt, and accelerate digital transformation projects. However, cloud migration security risks are often poorly understood at the outset or overlooked entirely.