Embrace Multi-Cloud with Cloud-Native Armor

Organizations are increasingly adopting multi-cloud strategies to leverage the distinct advantages and pricing options of different cloud providers, enhancing flexibility, and reducing dependency on a single vendor. This shift towards multi-cloud environments enables businesses to select services that best meet their needs. Additionally, the emergence of 'Cloud-Native' technologies is transforming business operations on the cloud, offering unprecedented operational efficiency, agility, and scalability.

Navigating the complexities of multi-cloud

Managing multi-cloud environments brings in challenges regarding integration, interoperability, and data movement. With no standardization, managing security across multi-cloud environments is complex. Organizations lack single pane of glass view and instead have siloed visibility of their security posture, making centralized monitoring and standardized security across multi cloud a problem. Disparte security tools could result in security gaps in terms of context sharing, integration and limited coverage. Also, multi-cloud data centers are distributed across geographies, making regulatory and compliance requirements inconsistent and often, segregated. In addition, organizations adopting multi-cloud could face increased expenditure on account of inefficient resource allocation or use of redundant resources.

Consider the shift to DevSecOps Models

We have witnessed several high-profile data breaches recently and developers are shifting to make stringent security an integral part of the application development process, throughout the development lifecycle (inception, design, build, test, release and beyond). DevOps merges development with operations, using Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), with emphasis on efficiency and speed. On the other hand, DevSecOps embeds security into every stage proactively, tracking vulnerabilities in the code through multiple gating controls. The shift from DevOps to DevSecOps is essentially the shift from the ‘bolt-on’ model for security solutions to a ‘built-in’ model.  To quote Forrester, “DevSecOps replaces bolt-on solutions by shifting security left, integrating security and risk personnel at the start rather than the end of a project, and automating processes.” By integrating security protocols within the very fabric of cloud infrastructure with cloud native armor, enterprises can fortify their digital landscapes against evolving threats. 

Safeguarding multi-cloud workloads with Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP)

As organizations shift to the cloud, considering increased regulation, the move to DevSecOps models and a heightened threat landscape, CNAPP is a new category of security. Coined by Gartner in 2021, CNAPP empowers teams to mitigate modern threats on cloud-native applications that cannot be detected by traditional security tools. The key components of a cloud-native security infrastructure emphasize adaptability and scalability, underscoring the importance of continuous monitoring, threat intelligence integration, and automation, to proactively identify and neutralize potential risks. As per Gartner, the CNAPP market will reach USD 4.2 billion by 2024, up from USD 2.4 billion in 2023, representing an outstanding 75 percent year-over-year growth.

Using CNAPP, organizations can provide full-stack security by combining various security components into a holistic and unified security solution. This includes Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM), CI/CD security, and more.

CSPM eliminates risk by identifying and remediating any misconfigurations present across public cloud environments. CWPP ensures that the workloads hosted on infrastructures such as traditional virtual machines (VMs), containers or serverless, that can be attacked by threat actors, are secure by offering visibility of existing vulnerabilities and protection against advance threats.

CIEM is an automated security tool that manages identities, permissions, access rights and privileges in multi-cloud environments. It can check and manage entitlements such as unintended access, dormant identities, any lateral movement of privilege access, excessive privilege, and third-party privilege from a centralized location. CI/CD security refers to the automatic security checks at each stage of the infrastructure or application development pipeline that protects the code being developed and prevents susceptibilities in software delivery. Coupled with additional and growing capabilities like code scanning (which examines code for security flaws), micro-segmentation (which divides the network into different segments to apply security), data security posture and threat intelligence, CNAPP ensures comprehensive risk coverage of multi-cloud environments. 

Conclusion

The days of patching together siloed solutions that do not integrate within a multi-cloud environment are behind us. Cloud-native armor in the form of CNAPP, guarantees that security solutions blend seamlessly to provide threat detection, compliance management, identity governance, secure hyper automation, and data protection across multi-cloud environments.

-By Shambhulingayya Aralelemath, Associate Vice President and Global Delivery Head, Cyber Security, Infosys