The modern cloud environment is enabling game-changing innovation — that’s clear. Mobile devices have an app for virtually anything, Internet of Things technologies are dazzling users, widely dispersed workers are collaborating more effectively than ever, countless things are now available “as a Service,” and the list could go on forever.
But with the growth, sprawl, and speed of cloud development, many organizations’ cloud-enabled software development life cycles are increasingly at risk, with an ever-expanding attack surface and the danger of missteps.
Over the next few years, the vast majority of cloud data security breaches — most the result of misconfigurations and coding mistakes — will be totally preventable with detection tools aiming to try to catch issues before they turn into nightmares. But these helpful detection tools can create an unhelpful avalanche of alerts that overwhelm security and development teams and get in the way of real cloud security efficiency.
How can you successfully use the detection tools you have in place in order to figure out which alerts matter most to your business and then quickly fix them before you find yourself with gaps that could be exploited? In this article, you take a look at some of the main pain points in cloud security remediation today and what can be done.
Experiencing the Big Pain Points
Today’s engineering teams have created vast continuous-integration pipelines that tap into code repositories, continuous-integration platforms, and tools for testing, orchestration, and monitoring. They all live within and across cloud platforms, so things are speedy and efficient.That’s great for business but a nightmare when it comes to keeping data secure in the cloud because everything from applications to developers to production environments are more distributed and complex than they used to be in the good old datacenter days. This situation creates seven pain points:
- Overlapping tools with duplicate alerts: Many effective security tools exist, but because the attack surface is so broad and complex, those tools overlap one another. A single event can trigger alerts in several different detection tools, and you don’t have a unified view into what the concerns are.
- Too many false alarms: The problem of alert overload from multiple tools is worsened by false positives that are then multiplied. In many cases a single root cause is at the heart of multiple different issues, along with multiple alerts — even from within the same product. Auto-scaling containers in the cloud can also auto-scale the alert load, unfortunately.
- Too few hours in the day for the security team: The blizzard of information makes it less likely that your security team will be able to keep up. They may spend a massive amount of time manually investigating threats and prioritizing risks, and by the time they’ve figured that out, there’s not enough bandwidth left for strategic issues.
- Difficulty finding the right fixer: An architecture based on microservices means a lot of folks are working independently, as individuals or distributed engineering teams, developing and releasing services on their own. That makes it more challenging to figure out who has an action item.
- Lurking shadow pipelines and exploitable secrets: Cloud container technologies let your developers spin up applications so quickly that the security team sometimes doesn’t even know they exist. Without a way to see “code to cloud,” you may not be aware of shadow DevOps activities and exploitable secrets.
- Not enough context on problem: The code owner, once identified, often must dig into each issue from scratch. There may be little or no context to help figure out the cause and solution.
- One-off solutions to zombie problems: After the fix has been devised, it may be implemented in a bespoke, one-off way. With no centralized view and no automation, there’s no guarantee that a problem that gets fixed today won’t crop up again tomorrow.
Building Sustainable Cloud Security
As your teams struggle with these pain points in cloud network security, take comfort in the fact that a certified cloud security professional can, indeed, deliver sustainable cloud security remediation. Here’s a four-point wish list of what a solution must be able to do:- Map and visualize: Your solution must paint a great picture of the code-to-production pipeline and all its resources. It should create a heat map showing how code moves through the pipeline and where along the path the security issues are arising.
- Deduplicate: Your solution must be able to normalize and deduplicate the vast number of alerts that your detection tools are ringing. It should do this by comparing details about code flaws and misconfigurations to trim the list into unique alerts.
- Find the root cause and the owner: For every unique issue, you need to know the root cause, the code owner, and the configuration drift. You need all the context you can get, including issue severity, exploitation, and relationships. By correlating information from code and cloud resources, you can cut out a lot of manual work.
- Streamline the fix: Regardless of the alert source, the cloud provider, the configuration, or the language in which the code is written, a sustainable solution needs to aggregate and make sense of the data to recommend fixes on the most critical issues. And preferably, it should be able to auto-generate those fixes.
How Dazz Fits into the Picture
The Dazz Remediation Cloud is a cloud security solution that tackles issue remediation as a data problem. Its agentless, SaaS platform uses patented artificial intelligence (AI), data correlation, root-cause analysis, and automation capabilities to help resource-constrained security teams quickly prioritize and fix the vulnerabilities that matter most in collaboration with their engineers.Here’s how it works:
- Graphing the pipeline: Dazz automatically gathers a wealth of information by way of its API connections to all critical points in the code-to-cloud process. It maps everything into a pipeline graph that connects all the dots, documenting every path that code follows from development to cloud deployment, and every resource that touches it along the way.
- Contextualizing security: Because it has created a big picture from multiple sources, the Dazz Remediation Cloud can analyze and backtrack each security issue to its source and eliminate duplicates. Dazz receives an alert from a cloud security tool, determines the specific cloud resource that caused the security issue, and traces the cloud resource back to the pipeline used to deploy it. Dazz figures out which vulnerable artifact was deployed and what triggered its build.
- Automating root cause analysis: Dazz Remediation Cloud uses a root-cause analysis engine to automate the next steps of investigating and prioritizing cloud security issues. It continuously ingests security risks and automatically investigates them. It quickly discerns the identity of code owners, a root cause context, and a fix suggestion. Dazz can determine how exploitable a code vulnerability is, which developer is responsible for the fix, where in the software development life cycle to make the fix — and perhaps most important, how to ensure you’re taking care of the root cause once and for all.
- Tapping the remediation knowledge base: Dazz suggests fixes by tapping into a remediation knowledge base. It’s generated by using threat intelligence, program analysis, and AI. Behind the scenes, it automatically tests thousands of new options of fixes for emerging vulnerabilities and builds a template to suggest the best remediation steps for whatever security issues it’s bringing to your attention.
- Adopting solid governance and reporting: Dazz builds in its own set of best-practice policies for pipeline governance. As part of its proactive monitoring, it’s continually on the lookout for violations and unapproved practices, and it facilitates reporting that your risk and compliance team will greatly appreciate. The solution helps users adopt best practices such as standard cloud configurations, right-sized privileged access, and full auditing.
Download Cloud Security Remediation For Dummies, Dazz Special Edition, today, and discover how to start creating sustainable cloud security remediation.
