The Ultimate Guide to Cloud Workload Protection: 5 Key Strategies
Introduction
Cloud technologies are evolving daily. And with changes taking place, these environments are getting more complex
day by day. With such complex infrastructure and policies in place, cloud workloads are always vulnerable to attacks
due to misconfigurations that are left unnoticed. Recently, Organizations are shifting their workloads to the cloud
with the flexibility it provides. But the question is: Are your workloads safe?
Cloud workload protection is generally defined as the process of securing workloads hosted in an organization’s cloud
environment. Various assets such as virtual machines, container images, runtime containers, or serverless functions are
involved. CWP combines different security techniques to protect these containers.
As said above, “Cloud is ever-evolving!” And thus, security should not be a “SET AND FORGET” practice. Security practitioners
and leaders should keep on evolving and look for possible threats that can compromise the security of their organization’s
cloud architecture. Now, let us look at some of the best practices to secure your workloads.
5 Best Practices to Secure Your Workloads
Right people and processes
Of course, your engineering teams should follow best security practices. However, they should not be responsible for
overseeing the security of your organization’s cloud infrastructure.
Organizations should have a designated person responsible for overseeing the security architecture of their cloud. This
entity is expected to work closely with DevOps, engineers, and other cloud users in an organization to understand the
business goals and in return build a secure cloud architecture.
We firmly believe that “Organizations don’t lack in technology, they lack in managing people and processes”.
- Enforce fine-grained access control policies for users and service accounts, limiting access to specific resources and actions based on roles and permissions.
- Continuously monitor and assess cloud-based workloads for security misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and compliance violations, recommending remediation actions and enforcing baseline security standards.
- Deploying CI/CD security tools can help you by automating security checks at each stage of the development and deployment process to prevent insecure code and configurations from entering production.
Endpoint protection
Cloud has its shared responsibility model, and it is your responsibility as an organization to secure all the assets
available in your cloud. Although, the cloud provides basic security control. It is also important to implement additional
security measures like Antimalware, Endpoint Security, Firewalls, etc.
Where organizations shifting to the cloud are using traditional security tools for their virtual machines, it is recommended
to use cloud-native security tools to get the best results which is also a better option.
Prioritizing Risks
We know that CWPP tools provide minute details when it comes to finding vulnerabilities. But, not every risk is a
risk! Organizations and their security teams should know “What to prioritize” when mitigating risks. Assessing the right
risk is the key! For this, we recommend following a top-down approach.
Prioritizing the risk levels from high to low can put your efforts and investments into the best ROI. Determining the amount
of risk a vulnerability has and the impact it can cause allows you to prioritize the risks.
Integrating the Cloud Workload Protection Platform can help organizations easily list vulnerabilities. It is a complete
security measure for organizations looking to secure their workloads. It scans, collects, analyzes, and shows data in
real-time.
Threat hunting and Incident response
Yes, you read that right! Organizations need to go beyond passive monitoring and actively search for hidden threats and
anomalies within their cloud workloads using threat-hunting methodologies and tools.
On the other hand, having a strong Incident Response plan will help in effectively tracking, managing, and learning from
previous security incidents. We also recommend automating post-incident response tasks such as forensics, remediation steps,
reporting, and minimizing downtime.
Prepare For Worst
Now that you have all the best tools and practices in place. You should not deny the fact that “No organization is
fully secured!”. Cloud environments are constantly evolving and so does their risk appetite.
Be ready for the worst! As an organization, make sure your teams are prepared for the worst-case scenario. Having proper
tools is good, but what if your teams don’t know how to act on it? Make sure your teams know “What, When, and How to
react to a security incident”. Proper security training and surprise drills can have a great impact.
Conclusion
Now that we have covered the required best practices, we want you to understand that cloud security requires more than
just the right tools. Strong foundations are derived from dedicated personnel managing security architecture. Remember,
no one is foolproof. Train your teams and prepare them for worst-case scenarios! Be proactive, adapt, and build a resilient
cloud posture.
Today companies use hybrid and multi-cloud environments which have unique protection requirements for their workloads.
This complicates their ability to get consistent visibility into their workloads. Network-based technologies do not work
well in cloud environments, it may put their enterprise data at high risk.
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