Four Reasons Your Cloud Security Is Keeping You Up At Night

We are excited to introduce guest posts from our newest Trenders from Cloud Conformity, now Trend Micro Cloud One – Conformity. More insights will be shared from this talented team to help you be confident and in control of the security of your cloud environments!

Why your cloud security is keeping you up at night

We are all moving to the cloud for speed, agility, scalability, and cost-efficiency and have realized that it demands equally powerful security management. As the cloud keeps on attracting more businesses, security teams are spending sleepless nights securing the infrastructure.

Somewhere, a cyber con artist has a target set on you and is patiently waiting to infiltrate your security. Managing your security posture is as critical as wearing sunscreen even if the sun is hiding behind a cloud. You may not feel the heat instantly, but it definitely leaves a rash for you to discover later.

Analyzing the volume of issues across the global Trend Micro Cloud One – Conformity customer base clearly shows that ‘Security’ is the most challenging area within AWS infrastructure.

According to an internal study in June 2019, more than 50% of issues belonged to the ‘Security’ category.

We can definitely reduce the number of security issues affecting cloud infrastructure, but first need to conquer the possible reasons for security vulnerabilities.

 1. Not scanning your accounts regularly enough

If you deploy services and resources multiple times a day, you must continuously scan all your environments and instances at regular intervals. Tools like Conformity Bot scans your accounts against 530 rules across five pillars of the Well-Architected Framework to help you identify potential security risks and prioritize them. You can even set up the frequency of scans or run them manually as required.

2. Not investing in preventative measures

Seemingly harmless misconfigurations can cause enormous damage that can rapidly scale up and result in a security breach. You can prevent potential security risks from entering live environments by investing some time in scanning your staging or test accounts before launching any resources or services. You can use a Template Scanner to scan your account settings against CloudFormation Template and identify any security and compliance issues before deployment.

3. Not monitoring real-time activity

Catastrophes don’t wait! It may take a few minutes before someone barges into your cloud infrastructure while you are away on the weekend. You need to watch activity in real-time to act on threats without delay. A tool such as Real-Time Monitoring Add-on tracks your account’s activity in real time and triggers alerts for suspicious activity based on set configurations. For example, you can set up alerts to monitor account activity from a specific country or region.

4. Not communicating risks in a timely manner

The information trickling from your monitoring controls is fruitless until you get the right people to act quickly. One of the best practices to maintain smooth security operations is to merge the flow of security activity and events into information channels. Conformity allows you to integrate your AWS accounts with communication channels, for example Jira, email, SMS, Slack, PagerDuty, Zendesk, ServiceNow ITSM, and Amazon SNS. Moreover, configuring communication triggers sends notifications and alerts to set teams through the selected channels.

AWS provides you with the services and resources to host your apps and infrastructure, but remember – Security is a shared responsibility in which you must take an active role.

See how Trend Micro can support your part of the shared responsibility model for cloud security: https://www.trendmicro.com/cloudconformity.

Stay Safe!

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