Cloud Security Monitoring, Management, and Compliance are three pillars that work together to make cloud operations safe and protect organizations against security breaches.
What is Cloud Security Monitoring?
What is Cloud Security Management?
What is Cloud Security Compliance?
What Tools Are Available to Enhance Cloud Security?
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Tools
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB)
Identity and Access Management (IAM) Systems
Encryption and Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
Addressing Limitations in Your Cloud Security Strategy with RAD Security
What is Cloud Security Monitoring?
Cloud security monitoring involves continuously observing cloud operations to detect potential threats and deviations, and ensure all components are working properly and no security policies, guidelines, and regulations are being compromised. All logs, network traffic patterns, user activities, and more are collected to view ongoing operations within the cloud.
Monitoring systems scan for and identify potential security threats, from unauthorized access and malware infections to suspicious network traffic patterns. When anomalies are observed, alerts are forwarded to the management team for further action.
What is Cloud Security Management?
Cloud Security Management receives alerts from monitoring systems and then uses this information to enforce security policies and control access to your cloud environment. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tools help with configuring and enforcing rules on resources and cloud management and are used for incident response workflows.
Management sends documentation of its updates to compliance to ensure these measures comply with regulatory standards.
What is Cloud Security Compliance?
Cloud security compliance tools ensure that all measures taken by management and all policies that organizations follow are consistent with regulatory rules and laws, such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS.
Compliance then provides this documentation to the monitoring system, which updates the monitoring system’s compliance status and gives recommendations for enhancing monitoring strategies.
What Tools Are Available to Enhance Cloud Security?
A daunting sequence of acronyms promotes cloud security measures: CSPM, IaC, CWPP, CASB, IAM, and DLP, among others. Each tool impacts the three pillars of cloud safety—monitoring, management, and compliance—in different ways, and each tool comes with limitations.
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Tools
- Monitoring: CSPM tools efficiently monitor any misconfigurations and compliance risks in the entire cloud setting.
- Management: When done right, CSPM tools work in conjunction with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools to remediate misconfigurations early on in the SDLC, preventing them from becoming misconfigurations at scale in a running environment.
- Compliance: CSPMs automatically test for adjustments as required by compliance systems, such as GDPR or HIPAA.
- Limitations: CSPMs do not perform real-time threat analysis and do not apply to detection and response for attacks; they are primarily a posture tool and one that is based on a static analysis at that.
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
- Monitoring: CWPPs constantly monitor the security integrity of the workloads across various environments, and traditionally use signature-based detection in cloud-native environments.
- Management: CWPPs install the recommended security features for servers, containers, and serverless workloads. Extended Berkeley Packet Filter, or eBPF, is the leading technology for runtime protection in containerized environments, allowing the running of programs for the kernel, which opens the door to real-time network monitoring capabilities, insights into how data flows and potential security issues.
- Compliance: CWPP solutions meet compliance requirements for endpoint, as well as some detection and response capabilities.
- Limitations: CWPPs primarily focus on workload security, leaving cloud, identity and infrastructure processes less guarded. It is critical to understand whether a CWPP solution is relevant for a cloud, or a cloud-native environment, as those two are not necessarily the same thing. CWPPs that are not specific to the runtime security requirements in containerized and Kubernetes environments will not work in those environments. The standard of protection for a CWPP specific to cloud-native is eBPF.
Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB)
- Monitoring: CASBs are primarily a security tool for SaaS tools, ensuring there are no ‘Shadow IT,’ or unknown applications, being used at any given time, and identifying overall patterns of usage for the SaaS tools that are known.
- Management: They oversee data and user access on all cloud services concerned.
- Compliance: CASBs can help with compliance around vendor and software supply chain inventories.
- Limitations: While strong in data security and access controls, CASBs do not provide detailed information on network-level events or system configurations, providing most of their value in IT asset inventory lists.
Identity and Access Management (IAM) Systems
- Monitoring: IAM systems control authentication to applications in the cloud, ensuring that the processes behind the scenes between the user and the authorization server are secure. Sometimes, they also monitor user activities and alert on events of unauthorized access.
- Management: IAM outsources the need to stay up to date with updates to OAuth and other authentication protocols, ensuring proper identity and access scrutiny to permit only authorized entities. This is helpful for IT teams onboarding and offboarding employees, controlling access to B2B SaaS applications, or engineering teams trying to offload the burden of secure authentication in application development.
- Compliance: IAM systems ensure that compliance and privacy regulations are followed for users’ data and passwords, and data protection policies are enacted.
- Limitations: IAMs are focused on the authentication process to protect against compromise of the authentication process, but not necessarily the authorization process of who is allowed to access what in the first place. IAM also has zero focus on cloud misconfigurations, and cloud roles and identities, which require another layer of analysis.
Encryption and Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
- Monitoring: DLP tools monitor the movement of sensitive data and usage to prevent data breaches and unauthorized access.
- Management: DLP and encryption tools locate, keep track of and protect organizations’ sensitive data at rest, in motion and in-use to prevent loss or compromise by bad actors.
- Compliance: Both encryption and DLP tools are crucial for compliance with data protection regulations, especially meeting HIPAA and PCI requirements.
- Limitations: Focused on data protection, these tools may lack broader security management features or the ability to monitor cloud configurations comprehensively. They will not be able to detect an attack that uses valid identities, programs or processes and they won’t be able to reduce the attack surface at a broad scale.
CNAPP
- Monitoring: A CNAPP provides applications security specific to a cloud-native environment, portending to cover the entire SDLC, from scanning and shift-left to runtime protection, infrastructure and cloud security.
- Management: CNAPPs vary widely in their capabilities when it comes to management and correction of issues in the environment. They can include gates in the CI/CD process, so images with a certain number of vulnerabilities or other issues won’t be allowed to pass, and they can include signature-based runtime detections and policies that stop certain workloads from running when they exhibit particular behaviors matching known issues. Some are less active and more passive, showing only attack paths that represent static, stale data from cloud APIs.
- Compliance: CNAPPs can support a multitude of compliance initiatives, from software supply chain compliance requirements to SOC2, SOX, PCI and HIPAA, even though many of these regulations have yet to catch up to the specific needs of containerized and Kubernetes environments.
- Limitations: Because their scope is so broad, and the ultimate goal of a CNAPP is a broader platform that encompasses the entire SDLC, and although they do a little bit of everything, they lack in-depth for any one use-case, whether that is zero trust, detection and response, or vulnerability management. For this reason, they will never be a one-stop shop, and will always be subject to rip-and-replace exercises, if one particular area of the platform dips so far below expectations that those teams responsible for that area cannot meet their specific need.
All of these cloud security tools can be used to support monitoring, management, and compliance in an organization. However, they have their limitations. Therefore, organizations often integrate multiple cloud security tools to implement a comprehensive cloud security solution.
Addressing Limitations in Your Cloud Security Strategy with RAD Security
RAD Security meets detection and response needs for cloud-native environments beyond what a CNAPP or cloud security tool might be able to provide, though in many ways RAD is complementary to these tools.
These solutions provide surface-level posture and late, signature-based detection that starts from the cloud and tries to look inward to the workload. In the cloud, things don't really change that much. Maybe some configurations every few weeks or so, but this is nothing compared to the speed of changes at the workload level in cloud-native environments. This means results are late, attack paths are static, and there is no way to detect a software supply chain or zero-day attack as it happens.
The RAD approach is from the perspective of the cloud-native workload out to the cloud - versus cloud into the workload; everything is real-time. For detection and response, when the environment is changing so fast, you really need to baseline behavior at the right level. . . which is at the container workload; e.g. processes, programs, files.
RAD is also the only solution with portable, transparent, behavioral fingerprints that are useful across the entire SDLC, as well as the only solution to go deep with a combined, 3 in 1 view of the areas attackers are targeting in cloud-native environments: behavioral runtime detection, identity and real-time posture.
The RAD approach means:
- Behavioral Fingerprinting: RAD Security profiles cloud-native workloads with unique behavioral fingerprints, enabling the automatic recognition of active attacks and providing stateful defense.
- Posture and Identity Context: RAD uses identity and infrastructure context to better understand the meaning of drift events, and to check whether the intended posture is the actual, real-time posture in an environment.
- Proactive Detection and Response: RAD’s solutions are purpose-designed to detect and respond to threats emanating from within the cloud-native architecture—from the workload and Kubernetes levels outward. This inside-out approach is more aligned with the operational realities of cloud-native environments and offers more direct and effective security measures.
- Complementary to CSPM: While CSPM is excellent for cloud infrastructure hardening, it is insufficient for comprehensive cloud-native detection and response. RAD’s solutions complement CSPM by filling in the gaps necessary for robust defense in cloud-native settings.
Ultimately, while traditional security tools remain a critical part of every cloud security strategy, RAD Security's detection and response capabilities create an ultimate source of truth for cloud breaches.