The Best Cloud Security and Compliance Solutions

As more businesses migrate to public cloud solutions, one of the most significant questions looming is how to keep sensitive information secure. In fact, only 2% of companies using public cloud solutions aren’t concerned at all with their system’s security.

Because of the multi-tenant nature of public cloud solutions, businesses have to protect data from external threats (i.e., data breaches, cyberattacks, ransomware, etc.) and internal threats (i.e., misconfigured resources and access management policies).

Since one of the primary benefits of the cloud is that it’s up and running 24/7, that means you have to monitor your system around the clock to ensure it stays secure. And that’s a lot to ask of your team members.

Why do I need extra security for my cloud?

Whether you’re using AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud, your initial question might be, “Shouldn’t the platform’s built-in security measures be enough to protect my data?” And it’s a valid question. In theory, using a public cloud instead of building a private cloud environment means taking advantage of the provider’s robust security initiatives.

But your public cloud provider only guarantees so much. The provider is responsible for securing the cloud infrastructure and giving you access to the tools you need to safeguard your workload. Once you start storing data on the cloud, your enterprise is responsible for:

• Keeping your sensitive data safe
• Complying with relevant compliance standards
• Logging activity to enable auditing
• Securing cloud configurations
• Deploying tools to protect your cloud environment
• Understanding which applicable service level agreements (SLAs) your cloud provider supplies

Another issue is that as technology progresses, so does the ability of hackers to find vulnerabilities in a system. When you’re dealing with a widely adopted cloud provider, they can go from tenant to tenant to find an easy target. And when the average data breach costs an enterprise around $4.24 million, you don’t want to take the chance of being that easy target.

The good news is that there are also significantly more security solutions for the more popular public cloud providers. Let’s take a look at some of the best things you can do to keep your cloud secure.

Best practices for keeping public clouds secure

When thinking about public cloud security, there are seven critical components to consider:

1. Accounts: setting identity and access management (IAM) policies to control permissions and authenticate login credentials
2. Servers: safeguarding your cloud server by adopting techniques like controlling inbound and outbound connections, encrypting data, using SSH keys, and minimizing account privileges
3. Hypervisors: ensuring the machines running hypervisors are hardened, patched, and isolated from public networks if you are running virtualized workloads on a public cloud (otherwise, your cloud provider will take care of the hypervisor)
4. Storage: mapping data flows, blocking access to storage for internal users who don’t need it, classifying data into sensitivity levels, clearing out old data regularly, and deploying data loss prevention (DLP) tools
5. Databases: hardening configuration and instances, setting database security policies, using automated tools to maintain database security policies, preventing public network access, and securing end-user devices.
6. Network: setting up a VPN for your cloud resources (VPC in AWS and VNet in Azure), defining rules for data flow, employing firewalls, and using cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools
7. Kubernetes: complying with security best practices, industry standards and benchmarks, and internal organization strategies

As you can see, taking care of a public cloud environment requires a great deal of time and effort. That’s where an automated security solution comes in.

Finding a public cloud security solution?

You could easily run a Google search and dig through various articles that rank the “top public cloud security solutions.” But what we’ve noticed is that many of these solutions only cover a piece of the whole. So what happens is that you have to piecemeal multiple options together to get the extensive security your cloud needs.

Even with some of the more robust options, the solutions only detect the issues, drifts, anomalies, and misconfigurations by scanning the cloud resources. They’ll provide reports and articles with best practices to solve these issues, but you end up having to rely on your internal SRE or cloud engineers to fix the problem.

The delay between discovering issues and finding someone to fix the problem only drives up your mean time to resolution (MTTR) and leaves your sensitive data vulnerable. As you look for a cloud security solution, you need to find an option that minimizes your MTTR.

Ultimately, the best way to do that is to use a program that offers the path of least resistance to remediation. Using one solution to detect and patch issues will reduce the cost of your cloud resources while keeping your cloud secure and compliant.

Top Cloud Security and Compliance Solutions

Fugue

As a part of Snyk, Fugue is a developer-first cloud security platform that offers cloud compliance, infrastructure as code (IaC) security, and vulnerability detection.

Fugue’s primary drawback is that it only detects code failures and leaves it up to the developer to fix misconfigurations.

Prisma Cloud

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is a comprehensive solution that integrates with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows to secure cloud infrastructure and apps in early development.

However, Prisma Cloud’s CI integration only enables automatic scans to detect vulnerabilities and leaves it up to the developer to fix the issues.

Datadog

Datadog is a Cloud Monitoring as a Service application that enables developers to see inside any stack or app at any scale whenever they’d like. Datadog uses deep observability capabilities to detect any problems.

Like the other leading cloud security and compliance solutions, Datadog only identifies problems without offering easy fixes.

MatosSphere

The MatosSphere by CloudMatos is a robust self-healing, self-aware, self-sustaining, self-resilient, and self-secure intelligent platform that offers complete cloud security and compliance governance. Instead of picking and choosing the best features from various programs, MatosSphere gives you everything you need to empower your cloud team with a single solution.

MatosSphere guarantees the highest level of cloud security through deep insights, infrastructure as code, network policies, IAM and AD integrations, monitoring, logging, and tracing. It also comes with a strong repository of remediation use cases related to cloud infrastructure resource security and compliance.

No matter what public cloud provider you’re plugged into, our SaaS solution offers cutting-edge tools that help you get the secure, compliant architecture you want with minimal effort. Seem like something that would make your life easier? Request your demo today.