What Is Public Cloud Security?
Public cloud security involves protecting the workloads, applications, and data hosted on public cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Public clouds operate under the shared responsibility model, where security responsibilities are divided between the cloud provider and the customer.
Security in the cloud is vitally important to protect against data breaches, compliance violations, and similar threats. However, traditional security controls and tools are not always effective in cloud environments. Organizations that ignore cloud-specific security controls may be exposing their cloud-based and on-prem resources to attack.
Top Public Cloud Security Challenges
Public cloud security challenges often stem from the cloud shared responsibility model, which breaks down the responsibility for cloud security between the provider and the customer. If an organization assumes that the provider is solely responsible for cloud security or misunderstands their responsibilities, this can lead to security gaps that are exploitable by an attacker. This problem is exacerbated by multi-cloud environments, where a customer’s responsibilities and the available tools may vary from one provider to another.
Misconfiguration Risks
Under the cloud shared responsibility model, cloud customers are responsible for properly configuring their cloud environment. However, cloud incidents are commonly caused by default settings, publicly-accessible storage, unreviewed permissions, and similar errors.
These types of vulnerabilities are a common target for attackers who take advantage of an organization’s lack of security visibility or poor policy hygiene. Organizations can catch these issues by deploying cloud security posture management (CSPM) solutions, but their adoption is inconsistent.
Lack of Visibility and Monitoring
In public cloud environments, the cloud customer doesn’t have access to or control over the underlying infrastructure. As a result, it can be difficult to achieve the same level of visibility into network traffic and user behavior as in an on-prem environment. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that public cloud environments enable shadow IT by making it easy for employees to deploy unauthorized cloud services.
Traditional security information and event management (SIEM) solutions often lack cloud-native context, so organizations deploy cloud-specific monitoring solutions. However, the lack of unified visibility and telemetry makes it difficult to trace user behavior across the entirety of an organization’s IT infrastructure.
Inconsistent Security Policies Across Clouds
Many companies have multi-cloud environments spanning several public cloud environments. In each, they’re responsible for securely configuring their cloud deployment as detailed in the cloud shared responsibility model.
However, each cloud provider has its own set of tools, controls, and policy frameworks that it makes available to customers to secure their environments. This creates a significant learning curve and ongoing friction as security teams attempt to implement consistent security policies across their entire IT environment. As a result, it is difficult to apply unified least-privilege and DLP policies to manage access and potential data exfiltration across clouds.
Excessive or Unchecked Access
Excessive access is a common challenge in public cloud environments. Often, these deployments are configured with privileged users or systems that are granted broad access to the organization’s cloud resources.
In multi-cloud environments, identity sprawl contributes to this due to the unique tools and configurations available in each public cloud platform. As a result, organizations lack crucial identity visibility and struggle with enforcing least privilege access controls at scale.
Compliance and Governance Complexity
Regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS apply equally to an organization’s on-prem and cloud-based resources. As a result, organizations are required to have certain security controls and configurations in place in the cloud.
Proving compliance with these regulations requires auditing cloud-specific security controls and providing cloud-specific evidence. Without unified visibility and policy enforcement, it can be difficult to achieve and demonstrate the required level of compliance.
Common Public Cloud Security Gaps
Modern Solutions to Public Cloud Security Challenges
Traditional security tools weren’t designed for cloud-native architectures and scale poorly across multi-cloud environments. Modern security solutions use APIs and agents to monitor cloud infrastructure and unify visibility, policy enforcement, and identity management in a single solution.
Unified Access Control
Unified access control solutions provide centralized visibility and policy enforcement across public cloud providers. These solutions integrate with identity and access management (IAM) solutions, such as Azure AD and Okta, and enable an organization to apply granular rules that consider context such as device, location, and time.
Cloud-Native Threat Detection
Cloud-native threat detection solutions provide visibility and control over threats targeting an organization’s cloud environment. For example, analysis of network traffic can identify anomalies or malicious content indicating an attack against an organization’s cloud-based resources.
Data Loss Prevention for Cloud Environments
Cloud DLP solutions offer granular visibility into data movement between apps, systems, and users. These solutions integrate with SaaS and storage tools to block unauthorized sharing of sensitive data in real-time. They can also help enforce data sovereignty rules, such as those detailed in the GDPR.
How Cato Enhances Public Cloud Security
While organizations can address common cloud security risks with point solutions, this leads to tool sprawl and siloed security. The Cato SASE Cloud Platform converges network and security capabilities into a single solution, offering unified visibility and control across an organization’s multi-cloud environment.
End-to-End Visibility Across Cloud and WAN
The Cato SASE Cloud Platform has comprehensive, unified visibility into all network traffic between clouds, users, and internal apps, eliminating potential silos. With visibility into east-west cloud traffic and the ability to correlate security events across all locations, it enables detection and remediation of internal threats and sophisticated cyberattacks. Additionally, a deep understanding of application traffic enables it to monitor and track behavior at the application layer rather than just network flows.
Identity-Based Access and Zero Trust Enforcement
Seamless zero-trust network access (ZTNA) across cloud and on-prem environments enables an organization to implement least-privilege access controls and zero trust principles across its entire IT environment. With unified identify management, access policies can follow the user, not the location or device. This allows an organization to reduce its digital attack surface by permitting users access to only those resources required for their role.
Simplified Multi-Cloud Policy Management
The Cato SASE Cloud Platform implements a single policy engine to manage an organization’s entire multi-cloud environment. This unlocks consistent policy management across the organization while reducing the risk of misconfigurations. Centralized policy management also simplifies compliance audits and enables centralized policy updates.
Secure Connectivity to Public Cloud Environments
With PoPs geographically close to major cloud regions, the Cato SASE Cloud Platform offers enterprise-grade security with minimal network latency. An integrated platform eliminates the need to deploy and manage third-party solutions and offers high-performance, secure remote access for remote users accessing cloud-based apps.
FAQ
What is public cloud security?
Public cloud security involves protecting cloud-based data, identities, and workloads in accordance with the cloud shared responsibility model. This includes managing configurations, identity, and other security requirements assigned to the cloud customer.
Why is public cloud security important for businesses using AWS, Azure, or GCP?
Public cloud environments are a common target for cybercriminals since they are directly accessible from the public Internet. Attackers take advantage of limited visibility, misconfigurations, and other security gaps to steal data and perform other malicious actions.
How does Cato Networks help secure public cloud environments?
The Cato SASE Cloud Platform offers centralized visibility, identity management, and policy enforcement across multi-cloud environments. With single-pane-of-glass visibility and control, security teams can more easily monitor, configure, and control their public cloud security architecture.
Is public cloud security different from private cloud security?
Public cloud environments are multi-tenant and externally managed, so an organization has less control over its environment and needs to adapt to its provider’s platform. In contrast, private clouds are internally managed, providing greater visibility and control.