Cloud native applications and technology drive today’s digital transformation, enabling organizations to deliver new products and applications to customers rapidly. This transformation greatly increases the challenge of operating IT and cloud infrastructures.
IT teams are no longer manage a single cloud and a handful of services. Instead, they manage clouds from multiple cloud service providers, and hundreds of different cloud services across them. In fact, according to the 2021 Flexera State of the Cloud Report, 92% of enterprises are using multiple public clouds. The average is 2.6 public clouds each.
This trend accelerated further with the shift to remote work during the pandemic. This shift results in teams securing their cloud with a patchwork of tools and approaches. None of which were designed to be cloud native.
The resulting landscape is complicated and messy. Many gaps are left in cloud security coverage and complexity is increased. This leads to a high cost of owning and operating a multi-cloud environment.
So, how can an enterprise keep their data and cloud secure while still getting the full value out of a cloud-native approach?
3 Key Enterprise Cloud Security Challenges
Here are the 3 most difficult challenges to consider when exploring cloud security solutions:
Key challenges in securing your cloud:
- In the shared responsibility model customers are responsible for workload security
- Security tools and techniques used today not designed for the cloud
- Ease of cloud adoption leads to a proliferation of products and Shadow IT
Shared Responsibility Model
Security in cloud computing is a team effort between the consumer of cloud services and the cloud provider. The shared responsibility model allocates the ownership of security between both parties. Cloud provider and customer each have a specific responsibility to ensure the security of the overall environment.
The provider is responsible for the security of the cloud itself – the data center and core services such as storage or networking. Customers are responsible for security of their data in the cloud. They need to protect their applications, configure cloud services properly, and harden the operating systems of their workloads and containers.
Lift and Shift Won’t Get You Cloud Security
Many cloud security problems stem from the fact that cloud-native applications require a unique approach designed for the cloud from the ground up. Customers must adapt the tools they use and controls already in place today for the cloud. Many organizations still rely on tools and approaches designed for data centers, on-premises applications, or hosted infrastructure. When applied to the cloud these approaches often fall short leading to friction between security and cloud development teams. Legacy approaches and tools for security are not able to handle containers or serverless environments. This leads to gaps in workload coverage and a lot of unnecessary complexity.
Rise of Shadow IT
As organizations migrate to the cloud it becomes easy for teams outside of IT to deploy their own cloud-based solutions to everyday business problems. Traditional tools overlook these “Shadow IT” applications as they don’t have the visibility into the cloud need to find them. These oversights lead to gaps in security coverage. Vulnerabilities and misconfigurations are easily missed, putting the organization at risk of data breaches.
Tackling these challenges requires tools that are designed to specifically be cloud-native. Today’s security teams need tools that provide full visibility into the cloud environment and reduce the time and effort needed to secure the cloud.
Why CNAPP is a Better Approach to Cloud Security
To get the cloud security coverage needed today, most enterprises are combining many tools from multiple vendors. It is a patchwork approach that creates problems for IT teams since many of these tools do not integrate with each other very well. This creates unnecessary friction between security and operations teams, which leads to a lack of visibility, and introduces complexity that slows teams down.
Today cloud security is addressed by a wide variety of solutions including CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker), CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management), and CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection Platform). A CASB acts as a secure broker between users and cloud applications. CSPM tools search for misconfigurations in your cloud configurations and help with meeting compliance goals. A CWPP protects workloads such as containers and instances by addressing deployment and operational security concerns.
CNAPP (Cloud Native Protection Platform) a new category of cloud security software Gartner introduced, is designed to solve all these problems. CNAPP takes a fresh approach to cloud security by integrating the best parts of multiple tools such CASB, CSPM, and CWPP into one. This integrated, single tool offers protection across the entire cloud infrastructure and cloud-native application lifecycle.
Xcloud – CNAPP Done Right by ColorTokens
Today ColorTokens is introducing Xcloud, a new CNAPP solution that is an integrates multiple cloud security tools into a comprehensive platform. Our security solution brings unparalleled risk visibility and essential insights into the risks that threaten your cloud and container environments. Within minutes, you can locate vulnerabilities, find malware, and detect misconfigurations. Monitor the compliance of your cloud against our built-in best practices. Once risks are found our prioritization engine highlights the most damaging issues, so you can quickly and efficiently remediate.
Xcloud goes beyond other CNAPP tools by providing a fully autonomous solution. Our agentless technology finds the most elusive threats across your entire cloud and container environments. With nothing to install, deploy, or configure Xcloud keeps you secure automatically. It saves your team from having to learn and manage a complicated tool. Xcloud lets you team get back to work fixing actual issues instead of correlating data between multiple tools.
Unifying your cloud security tools with Xcloud delivers many benefits to your business. It is simpler to operate one tool in place of many. Xcloud provides more context about your environment. It reduces your spend by consolidating many existing tools into one.
To learn more about Xcloud and how to start a free test drive, please visit the
Xcloud product page.
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