By Benjamin Mourad, Senior Director, Solution Architect, Enterprise Offerings
Deltek projects the federal government will increase cloud computing spend by $7.6 billion from FY 2023 to FY 2027, as government agencies and other organizations leverage SaaS, modernize legacy applications, and continue to close data centers. Bad actors, however, are not far behind and look to take advantage of challenges like limited visibility and complex, difficult-to-secure cloud environments. Cyber attacks focusing on cloud networks and cloud services have increased significantly in recent years.
Cloud Security Complexity
Many cloud-native resources are transient, making it difficult for organizations to consistently monitor risks, control attack surfaces, and enforce policies., A single application may involve various cloud services to operate effectively, opening opportunities for lateral movement of cyber threats and making it more difficult to control risks. Coupled with increasing adoption of hybrid multi-cloud operating models and edge computing, organizations are challenged with gaining a total visibility and real time observability on their IT environments and risk posture.
Addressing this challenge requires continuously reassessing risks and adapting security controls to combat threats—a nearly impossible task to conduct manually. Automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning powered cyber analytics, and a zero-trust security architecture can help streamline this process, improve governance, and enable rapid detection and response.
Enterprises must manage security posture and comply with security standards continuously. DevSecOps – an approach that incorporates security in every aspect of application development, release, and operation activities – is critical to application modernization success. Incorporating rigorous DevSecOps practices and continuous risk management throughout cloud management lifecycles ensures more resilient and secure IT services for enterprise organizations, their customers, and the general public.
To help organizations address these complexities, we’re announcing Cloud Security+, an innovative and comprehensive solution that provides unified compliance and intelligent, integrated security to safeguard cloud environments, applications, and data.
The Value of Cloud Security+
Cloud Security+ provides a holistic security management of cloud environments, enhances visibility, automates security governance and operations, ensures continuous security compliance, and improved threat detection and risk remediation across hybrid- and multi-cloud environments. It enables the highest maturity levels, Advanced or Optimal, defined by the DHS CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model 2.0.
Our solution enables organizations to keep pace with dynamic attack surfaces by automating asset discovery, vulnerability and threat detection, dependency analysis, compliance management and impact containment. Additionally, utilizing AI/ML technologies, Cloud Security+ accelerates threat detection and provides actionable insights for proactive risk mitigation and incident response.
Cloud Security+ includes Compliance-as-Code (CaC) technologies that automates security controls and documents creation and expedites security accreditation processes. It provides continuous penetration test capabilities to allow an organization to continuously assess security posture and maintain security assurance.
With enhanced visibility and analytics, Cloud Security+ allows organizations to effectively protect critical assets with these key features:
- Automated Threat Detection and Response Orchestration: With advanced analytics and intelligent automation, our service autonomously detects, investigates and responds to threats and security incidents in cloud environments.
- Automated Security Posture Management: Automatically discovers cloud assets and assesses configurations, identifies and remediates vulnerabilities, and manages security postures continuously at a more granular level, minimizing the impact of a cyber breach.
- Comprehensive Data Security Management: Provides rapid, agentless visibility into critical data and applies proper protection controls in accordance with data classification.
- Cloud Identity and Entitlement Management: Manages authentication and authorization for users, services, applications, and APIs across cloud and multi-cloud environments with dynamic secrets. It minimizes the risk of access control hacking and defeats the most common attack vector.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Security: Applying the principle of DevSecOps and GitOps, our solutions proactively review vulnerabilities in IaC scripts, artifacts, libraries and modules. IaC security centralizes security policy management across diverse cloud environments.
- Micro-segmentation: Applying Zero Trust Security principles, our solution segments applications, users, services, data, and access based on business rules with robust security vetting on every transaction session. This approach eliminates the possibility of threat lateral movement and allows rapid threat quarantine and impact containment.
Given the financial incentives and mission impact tied to compromising cloud services, it’s unlikely that cyber-attacks to cloud environment and cloud applications will go away. Organizations must have robust visibility and security capabilities to protect critical business assets in cloud. Failure to do so can result in data breaches, operational disruptions, reputation damage, and loss of stakeholders’ trust.
At DMI, our extensive experience providing cloud services for both government and private industry organizations allows us to gain a broad perspective and expertise in understanding and managing cloud security risks. We’re well-equipped to address your unique security requirements and challenges, regardless of where you operate.
To learn more, check out our fact sheet about Cloud Security+ – This link will open a PDF document.
