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Why do we need continuous audits for public cloud?

  • Sujay Maheshwari Sujay Maheshwari
  • Thursday, Mar 10, 2022

Introduction to Continuous audits for public cloud

Businesses have lost track of crucial control measures needed for their cloud infrastructure due to the rapid adoption of cloud computing, AWS, Azure, and Google cloud services are now more popular than ever due to the pace of innovation and customer expectations from the business.

Gartner predicts that 85% of enterprises will adopt the cloud-first approach by 2025. In addition to reducing IT costs, the cloud may also offer greater flexibility and efficiency. Companies have also used cloud tools to adjust to the ongoing pandemic.
Read our recent article - Building Security Using GenAI

Along with the adoption of cloud services, they also welcome many associated risks. Some significant risks include:

  • Loss of governance
  • Authentication and authorization
  • Compliance and legal risks
  • Security incidents management
  • Malicious behavior of insiders
  • Insecure or incomplete data deletion

According to the Cloud Standards Customer Council, when you move your data to the cloud, you generate a certain degree of responsibility for your cloud provider, so ensure that they are both reliable in their own right and willing to safeguard your data.

Incorporating measures such as regular audits into your organization’s security program can help eliminate problems arising from infractions of in-house policies – either accidentally or by design – or identify whether the cloud provider has fallen below minimum compliance standards.

Why are Audits beneficial for Cloud users?

There are two significant benefits of audits for cloud users. These benefits should be considered on a priority basis while moving to the cloud.

  1. Auditing provides security assurance
  2. Auditing lowers the risk of data breaches in the cloud.

Security Assurance

Cloud computing comes with its own set of security challenges. Cloud infrastructure results from a constant three-way negotiation among service organizations, cloud service providers (CSPs), and end-users to ensure productivity while maintaining a reasonable degree of security. A cloud security audit addresses unique problems typically not handled in traditional IT security audits. Audits determine if an information system and its maintainers comply with legal expectations concerning data protection and the company’s financial objectives regarding protection against various security threats. Cloud audits allow staying transparent, meaning security-relevant data is transparent to CSP customers. Transparency lets organizations pinpoint potential security risks and dangers and design and develop the proper countermeasures and suggestions for their company.

Low risk of data breaches

The right audit can make a huge difference for companies using the cloud and ensure that their cloud service provider and their DevOps and engineering team members make proper use of the cloud infrastructure to stay compliant. In other words, you want to know everything you can about the environment in which your data will be stored.

Taking responsibility for your cloud computing decision will allow you to be aware of situational circumstances, evaluate alternatives, identify priorities, and affect changes in security and privacy that serve the best interest of your company. Making the right choice of an audit is a big step toward success.

What do Auditors test in your cloud while auditing?

Auditors rely on different procedures such as inquiry, physical inspection, observation, confirmation, analytics procedures, and re-performance to collect evidence. These test procedures are combined to obtain evidence to provide an opinion on the service being audited.

Continuous Security Audits

Continuous security audits monitor your entire technology environment 24/7, 365, alerting any deviations from your security baselines.

The security teams continuously audit with ongoing monitoring to get an up-to-date view of actual cloud environment risks. Respected teams are alerted automatically when a risk arises. Once alerted, they can immediately remediate issues before they spiral into massive problems.

Continuous cloud auditing and risk assessments are impossible with manual auditing as it is time-consuming and prone to human error.

Top Benefits of Continuous Audit for Public Cloud

An appropriate continuous audit tool can bring substantial benefits to organizations. Automation allows for a more accessible hands-off approach to process management. Analyzing and reporting become straightforward when all the data is organized and laid out. Teams can quickly gather and analyze data on risk on activities while they occur.

Access Insights

Continuous auditing detects risk and provides the security teams with emerging insights into the risk landscape. For e.g. A company that detects continuous access trials from an unknown IP address from an unapproved region can implement controls and monitor the misconfigurations with the help of constant audits.

Immediate Detection of Errors and Frauds

Modern cloud technology allows for minor changes in workload to be detected. With auditor’s regular checks that happen in a detailed manner at regular intervals, errors and fraud could be detected as soon as they occur, and you could remediate them.

Misconfiguration Prevention

Misconfigured clouds add to risk and go unnoticed until something goes wrong. Misconfigurations might seem straightforward and avoidable, but they are the most significant risks to cloud environments. 65-70% of all security challenges in the cloud arise from misconfigurations. Continuous audits help organizations identify possible misconfigurations before they are discovered, preventing costly breaches.

AWS Misconfigurations

It takes one mistake on your part for a malicious actor to damage your brand!

Cloudanix AWS misconfigurations

GCP Misconfigurations

Your data needs highest level of protection. Cloudanix can provide that to you.

Cloudanix GCP misconfigurations

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The easy part of misconfiguration is that you can learn about them with minimal effort.

Misconfigurations at a glance

When conducting continuous audits for public cloud, consider these four key steps

Discover

Continuous audits automatically map out and visualize your multi-cloud to identify all data stores and resources and monitor them from time to time.

Classify

Bucket them to prioritize, escalate, educate and effort estimate. This helps with visibility and cross-functional teams’ buy-in.

Lock it down

Collaborate and agree on how to fix issues to mitigate the risks. Build and spread the culture to follow the “agree steps/ practices” to secure the future.

Protect

Continual audits will enable you to monitor your cloud environment, detect any changes in your cloud, and remediate the risk in real-time when your security baseline is drifting. Cloudanix is built for this reason which takes the burden off your shoulder and does continuous auditing of your Cloud environments.

Solutions to roadblocks in cloud security

Conclusion

The demand for cloud computing audits has grown as users realize that data hosted by other organizations carries certain risks. As a result, they are requesting various forms of cloud computing audits to gain assurance and reduce the risk of their information being lost or hacked.

Cloud computing audits come in different forms, such as SOC 1 & SOC 2 reporting, HITRUST, PCI, and FedRAMP. Depending on your requirements, one of these should meet your audit necessities.

Audit and Compliance at one place

Cloudanix has curated a plan that can cover all of your audit and compliance needs

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What Our Users Are Saying

Customer Reviews

Cloudanix is trusted by security leaders worldwide to deliver proactive, reliable, and cutting-edge cloud security.

One day, I changed the password of a root account, and my CTO called me within less than a minute to confirm if I did so. I was not expecting a reaction this quick. He told me Cloudanix alerted him of this password change and that he wanted to confirm as it was a critical security notification. I couldn't believe it!

Ritesh Agarwal
Ritesh Agarwal
CEO, Airgap Networks

Compliance is one way of staying secure, but what I want is the ability to go deeper and attain 'true security.' Cloudanix provides us the capability to do so.

Vishal Madan
Vishal Madan
Head of Engineering, iMocha

Cloudanix is building for the future of the cloud, which makes the product all the more desirable.

Ritesh Agarwal
Ritesh Agarwal
CEO, Airgap Networks

Cloudanix gave us the visibility we were missing. Being able to move from permanent access to a robust Just-In-Time (JIT) workflow has fundamentally changed our security posture without slowing down our engineering velocity.

Pavan Kumar Lekkala
Pavan Kumar Lekkala
SRE Lead, HugoHub

We are excited to leverage Cloudanix's comprehensive multi-cloud DevSecOps solution to secure our production workloads on AWS. Cloudanix has demonstrated that it can solve many challenges that DevSecOps teams face while continually adding new features such as SOC2 compliance and drift detection.

Satish Mohan
Satish Mohan
Co-founder & CTO, Airgap Networks

Managing third-party partner access was once a major concern for our security posture. With Cloudanix JIT Cloud, we've effectively achieved zero third-party risk. We can now grant access confidently, knowing that it is temporary, audited, and automatically revoked, resulting in a 100% reduction in our privileged access exposure.

Okesh Badhiye
Okesh Badhiye
Head of Technical Engineering, Finfinity

The snooze feature and responsible alerts have helped us save time and prioritize what to tackle first.

Satish Mohan
Satish Mohan
Co-founder & CTO, Airgap Networks

Implementing Cloudanix JIT internally allowed us to practice what we preach. By eliminating permanent access to our own clouds and databases, we've neutralized the risk of standing privileges, ensuring our own 'keys to the kingdom' are never left exposed.

Girish Manghnani
Girish Manghnani
Managing Partner, Tech Inspira

The problem with permissions is a lot of times, the gaps are left open due to oversights from inside the organization itself. With Cloudanix's CIEM, we get a complete view of user permissions and access. This enables us to update the permissions, reducing the attack surface.

Nilesh Pethani
Nilesh Pethani
Application Architect, iMocha

In the world of Fintech, trust is our currency. Cloudanix provided the frictionless visibility we needed to secure our EKS workloads across AWS, ensuring we stay audit-ready for SOC2 and GDPR without slowing down our engineering velocity.

Amol Naik
Amol Naik
Head of Security & Infrastructure, HugoHub

Cloudanix delivered value within 5 minutes of onboarding. Continuous monitoring, timely detection, and excellent documentation helped us attain a great cloud security posture.

Divyanshu Shukla
Senior DevSecOps, Meesho

Technology strategies and business strategies are in a state of constant change which includes centralization and decentralization of responsibilities. Regardless of strategic shift, we still have intellectual property to protect. Cloudanix are critical partners for us in our public cloud security posture across our three cloud providers.

Jerry Locke
Jerry Locke
Senior Director Global Solutions Engineering, Eversana

Cloudanix has been amazing. They opened up a common Slack channel with us — and it feels like we are talking to our own team and getting things done with Cloud security. The support team is always available, friendly, helpful, and ready to go out of their way.

Satish Mohan
Satish Mohan
CTO, Airgap Networks

Beyond just access management, Cloudanix CSPM has given us a unified view of our AWS environment. The real-time alerting and anomaly detection allow us to prevent any untoward activity before it happens, which is critical for a marketplace connecting 50+ financial institutions.

Okesh Badhiye
Okesh Badhiye
Head of Technical Engineering, Finfinity

For a Fintech company, data is our most valuable — and most sensitive — asset. Cloudanix DAM hasn't just improved our visibility; it has given us control. The ability to mask data and prevent unauthorized queries in real-time is a game-changer for our compliance and customer trust.

Jiten Gala
Jiten Gala
President Engineering and Product, Kapittx

Our clients, especially in the Middle East financial sector, demand absolute accountability. Cloudanix JIT Cloud has been a competitive differentiator for us, allowing us to provide secure, governed access to customer accounts that meet their strictest audit and compliance requirements.

Girish Manghnani
Girish Manghnani
Managing Partner, Tech Inspira

Cloudanix is always on my team's lips because of its exceptional support. Be it a small or big query, Cloudanix has gone above and beyond to resolve them. This one's a keeper for us.

Sujit Karpe
Sujit Karpe
CTO, iMocha

For a long-lasting partnership, great support goes a long way. Cloudanix has delivered exceptional support whenever required. Their edge is their team is always ready to go beyond to solve any issues that we have. This speaks volumes about the culture at Cloudanix.

Akash Maheshwari
Akash Maheshwari
Co-founder, MoveInSync

Beyond the technology, Cloudanix feels like an extension of our own team. Their willingness to stand up a dedicated Middle East tenant for us and provide exceptional support at a sensible price makes them a long-term partner for Hugosave.

Surya Tamada
Surya Tamada
CTO, HugoHub

The real-time notifications that Cloudanix provides are a real lifesaver. Their adaptive notifications ensure that my team stays productive and doesn't get interrupted all the time.

Digvijay Singh
Staff Security Engineer, Meesho

The whole point in technological evolution is to help improve the world we live in. We must protect that and to do so requires an effective and efficient security strategy. The Cloudanix team helped make our public cloud security posture management strategy a reality. The symbiotic relationship we have allows for a continuous feedback loop which is how business should operate.

Larry Wheat
Larry Wheat
Staff Solutions Engineer, Eversana

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