4 mins to read
The Cloud has emerged as possibly the most scalable, affordable, and convenient modes of data storage. However, cloud usage comes with a set of considerations that determines data security. Unlike the days of the data center, with sandboxed data management infrastructures, the Cloud involves multiple remote accounts, trust relationships, and permission inheritances that make it extremely challenging for data owners to keep a close tab. In our blog, we will cover the four pillars to de-risk your cloud.
Identifying the Risks of the Cloud
System and service misconfigurations are one of the primary challenges faced by Cloud users which has led to major data breaches. As we’ve seen, even the most sophisticated and well-funded organizations have had their issues.
Organizations can minimize risk by first identifying the risks leading to unauthorized privileges. There are four major pillars or risk factors that determine the effectiveness and security of a Cloud system. It is essential for not just data owners, but also cloud operations, security and audit teams, to recognize these risks to maximize their control management, security and governance of data within their public Cloud environments, like AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes.
Identity Issues
It has become extremely easy to create identities, both human and non-human, within the Cloud system. These identities may be provided with access rights that were not originally intended and/or created by accident. Additionally, these identities may remain invisible and untrackable to data owners. These roles may contain special administrative rights such as to enumerate and extract data (as was the case with many of the more well-known data breaches), which have the potential to compromise data systems.
Data Storage Exposures are Inadequate Indicators
Transparent Cloud data storage alone is insufficient in risk assessment strategies. While data owners may trust their DevOps team to manage the storage of data objects, this does not reveal the full extent of accessibility and privileges of external parties. Cloud users must remain privy to the micro-movements in their data channels to ensure foolproof security. It is necessary to be fully aware of where their data truly exists, which Identities (human and non-human) have access to it, how it is being accessed and where it might be moving to/from.
Coordination Issues
The (very) outdated paradigm of sending alerts to a single team to triage and manage simply isn’t feasible. In the Cloud operating model, the environment is simultaneously being used by disparate groups of specialists, which include audit, DevOps, Cloud, and Security staff. Here the outdated paradigm simply breaks down. The solution is to get the issues to the teams that created them, and are in the best position to address them, as soon as quickly as possible. This ensures that issues are addressed in both an appropriate and timely manner.
Sonrai Dig’s Revolutionary Cloud Management Solutions
The Sonrai Dig platform provides public Cloud users with a revolutionary four-step process that minimizes the risks of data management. Our advanced system assesses and checks against the four pillars of Cloud security to provide an innovative long-term solution.
Regulates the Principle of Least Privilege
Sonrai’s advanced analytics monitor every Identity and Data relationship to determine the Effective Permissions. This ensures that Identities are provided with the minimum amount of rights to fulfill their duties. Through this, detailed graphs are created and continuously updated, to visualize all the Identity to Data relationships, resulting in a highly systematic structure for easy management.
Our tool provides comprehensive monitoring that includes current accessibilities and potential privileges. We help data owners maintain the principle of least privilege to reduce common data threats such as separation of duties, toxic combinations, and privilege escalations.
Locks Down Crown Jewel Data
Sonrai Dig’s revolutionary solution finds, classifies, and de-risks the most valuable data in your system. The “blast radiuses” of potential security concerns are reduced with the auto-elimination of inactive data access rights. The locked-down precious data is closely monitored with a built-in alarm system that triggers in the event of sudden and unexpected activity.
Shift Left by Integrating Teams
Our software provides the best collaborative arrangements early in the data management process. This helps data owners to establish the most effective system from the get-go. We provide swimlanes that organize Clouds by team and access rights, while each system alert is configured according to its given context and delivered to respective teams to facilitate the swiftest response.
Prevent & Remediate Issues
The Sonrai Dig platform is also well-structured at preventing data issues before they cause any damage. We treat remediation and prevention bots like a person. A spotted issue will be escalated to the right team or bot (that the team tracks and audits). This results in a high-performance compliance structure for your public Cloud.
Sonrai Dig puts prevention rules in place across your cloud and makes sure the rules are continuously met. Remediation bots fix risks that are found in the environment before they become problems. If there is a problem detected in your environment, our prevention bot can be deployed to close it down. With multiple teams pushing workloads to the cloud, checks are in place, and promotion only happens if your risk policies are followed. With out-of-the box automation, bots eliminate risks automatically in your organization and have a flexible framework that allows you to add your own custom bots. Workflow gives you control over escalation to prevent alert fatigue and all bot activity is audited to keep you compliant.
API’s allow full integration into your CI/CD pipeline so that code promotion (ie: Dev→Stage→Prod) only happens if risks are managed and identity and data security standards are enforced. This can be unique for each step of your process and Sonrai gives you the flexibility needed to meet those unique requirements.
Through combining Sonrai Dig‘s unique Cloud-graphing capabilities with DevOps strategies, organizations will achieve the best outcomes in data risk management.
Sonrai Dig can help
Sonrai Security delivers an enterprise security platform focused on identity and data security inside public clouds. We show you all the ways data has been accessed and can be accessed in the future. Our platform delivers a complete risk model of all these identity and data relationships, including activity and movement across cloud accounts, cloud providers, and third-party data stores. We can help de-risk your cloud.
To learn more about the four pillars of cloud security or how to de-risk your cloud, please view our webinar series on the “Getting to and Maintaining Least Privilege” and “Locking Down Crown Jewel Data in the Public Cloud”. Or if you prefer to see how your cloud stacks up, request a demo.
