In today’s rapidly evolving IT environment, the concept of cloud-native computing stands out as a game-changer. As organizations move from traditional on-premises infrastructure to cloud-based solutions, they are changing where their data and applications reside and how they are built, deployed, and protected in an ever-changing digital realm. To understand the knowledge of a holistic approach to cloud-native security, visit UBS’s Certified CISO (C|CISO) and Cyber Security Specialist online where he specializes in security research, planning, execution and maintenance. We interviewed Priyanka Kulkarni Joshi.
Priyanka is also an expert in auditing and risk management, ethical hacking, and compliance and has managed various freelance security projects. She has excellent management skills and an impressive track record in her IT security industry, which led to her being nominated as a Cyber Spartans Award Winner in 2020. Through her experience in the cloud and her security, she delves deep into the transformative power of her native environment in the cloud and, more importantly, the pivotal role of security in this change. This article also describes basic challenges and best practices and provides insights for securing your native cloud infrastructure.
What is the importance of cloud-native security in modern IT environments?
The importance of cloud-native security in modern IT environments lies in customizing the security features of cloud platforms. Implementing cloud-native security is critical to protecting your business from potential threats and unauthorized access to data stored in the cloud. This includes confidential business content related to client orders, designs, requirements, financial information, etc. Additionally, this measure also helps avoid data leaks and theft of sensitive information. Protecting your data is paramount to maintaining customer trust and protecting the assets that support your competitive advantage.
What are some common security challenges specific to cloud-native applications and infrastructure?
Some of the most common challenges in security implementation cloud are:
- Security resource cost
- Lack of visibility in distributed systems
- reliability issues
- Keep outdated technology up to date
- Microservice monitoring.
- Ability to filter important metrics from a pool of metrics
- Identify the right tool or platform.
- Security and compliance
- lack of technical expertise
Can you help me understand the shared responsibility model from a security perspective for containerized applications?
The shared responsibility model for containerized applications is a security and compliance framework that represents the obligations of cloud service providers and container security stakeholders. This is an important part of a comprehensive security assessment that protects applications from potential risks and uses a combination of security tools and policies. Simplified in definition, this model, when applied to containerized applications in use, provides cloud encryption of data at rest and data in transit, and data security for group configurations. Responsible for all aspects of cloud environments.
What are the best practices for securing serverless applications in cloud-native architectures?
Best practices for ensuring serverless security include storing sensitive data (credentials, PII, SSN, etc.) securely in a protected database. Further security can be achieved by managing and restricting access and ensuring a secure and restricted accessibility framework.
Some best practices can be implemented as follows:
- Minimize the role of functions
- Monitor logging functionality
- Adopt an API gateway
- Always scan for malicious code (verify each code before it is published)
- Perimeter security must be tight, and so is the functional level.
Maintaining this practice allows you to assign specific privileges to individual functions and ensure that these privileges are limited to the narrowest scope needed. This approach strengthens perimeter security and reduces the impact of potential attacks.
How can you secure your microservices and APIs in a cloud-native ecosystem?
Ensuring the security of microservices and APIs in cloud-native ecosystems is a big challenge, and both APIs and microservices play important roles in cloud-native environments. Microservices serve as the basis for distributed and shared computing resources. On the contrary, APIs are a very efficient way to streamline operational and development tasks with operations teams and properly separate services that are used every time from other tasks.
There are several ways to secure your microservices architecture.
- Use HTTPS
- scan for dependencies
- reduce loopholes
- cover the security base
- Use access and ID tokens
- Understand cloud and cluster security
- TLS security and secret management
- Extended authentication must be managed.
- access log
According to you, what are the key components and considerations for achieving a comprehensive cloud-native security strategy?
Some of the key components of comprehensive cloud-native security are listed below.
- data protection
- Incident response
- detection control
- access management
- Encryption management
What is the most appropriate way to respond to a security breach or incident in a cloud-native environment?
Responding to a security breach or incident in a cloud-native environment should be similar to cyber incident response. In contrast, breaches from cloud-native attacks often follow the typical progression of compromised legitimate user accounts, account reconnaissance, privilege escalation, resource misuse, data leakage, and credentials. Cloud incident response is similar to traditional incident response in terms of the planning, procedures, and controls that drive incident detection and response actions. However, because cloud adoption involves a shared responsibility model, having some knowledge of cloud adoption incident preparation keys and incident strategies can help ensure an effective response to security incidents and help organizations effectively manage IT disruptions. will help you deal with it.