2023 was an eventful yr for cloud safety. We noticed a number of high-profile incidents, resembling the invention of a far-reaching zero-day vulnerability within the MOVEit file switch server utility and an increase in attackers focusing on cloud credentials for lateral motion. Throughout the board, over half (58%) of firms skilled cloud-based phishing assaults in 2023, and 30% reported focused assaults on their cloud infrastructure. There was additionally a rise in new assault techniques focusing on DevOps pipelines and cloud storage options as menace actors continued “shifting left” earlier within the utility lifecycle.
These insights underscore simply how difficult it may be to guard complicated multicloud environments. Nevertheless, by taking a step again and analyzing among the largest cloud safety developments from the previous yr, we are able to higher evolve future protections to stay one step forward of the most recent adversarial techniques, strategies, and procedures.
Knowledgeable by the highest developments of 2023, learn on to be taught how one can adapt your cloud safety technique in 2024.
3 key cloud safety developments to observe in 2024
- Organizations wish to consolidate safety throughout all the utility lifecycle within the cloud. As increasingly more firms embrace a cloud-first method, we’re seeing beforehand siloed capabilities like information safety posture administration, DevOps safety posture administration, exterior assault floor administration, container safety, and extra get folded beneath a single cloud safety umbrella.
As attackers “shift left” and goal code vulnerabilities, it’s vital to safe your utility improvement from the beginning. In an effort to try this, organizations should combine safety into the DevOps course of and allow safety groups with elevated visibility and coverage administration enforcement. Reasonably than making an attempt to perform this with particular person level options, many firms are as a substitute prioritizing vendor consolidation within the type of cloud-native utility safety platforms (CNAPPs). Forty % of firms reported utilizing a CNAPP in 2023, and an extra 45% plan to implement one by the top of 2024.
It is because CNAPPs act as a unified command heart the place safety and developer groups can evaluation and implement safety insurance policies from one centralized dashboard. Not solely does this assist correlate and contextualize safety indicators throughout your total cloud enterprise, however it additionally delivers extra complete safety from the earliest levels of utility improvement to deployment and runtime. This functionality is vital if organizations are to counter the continuing “shift left” development in cybersecurity.
- Generative AI is rising as a vital want in cloud safety. AI additionally rose to prominence in 2023 and can probably proceed to be a vital enabler of cloud safety in 2024. Considered one of its largest benefits is that AI can rapidly analyze and prioritize the 1000’s of safety indicators admins obtain each day—serving to groups get to a state of real-time menace detection and automatic response.
Reasonably than having safety admins type by disparate alerts, which is time-consuming and may result in vital missed indicators, machine studying can be utilized to determine patterns in huge quantities of knowledge, separate related indicators from false safety alerts, and prioritize alerts primarily based on their potential influence on the group. This permits safety groups to focus their consideration on remediation reasonably than getting slowed down within the flood of each day alerts.
New developments in generative AI may assist upskill extra junior safety admins whereas creating effectivity and scale. For instance, practically half (46%) of firms reported missing the required safety experience to implement DevSecOps of their cloud surroundings in 2023. When embedded as a part of a CNAPP, generative AI can proactively counsel remediations and information admins by incident response in accordance with the corporate’s pre-defined safety insurance policies.
- CISOs face more and more stringent compliance and threat disclosure necessities. Lastly, 2023 noticed a variety of high-profile circumstances in opposition to cybersecurity executives. In Might, Uber’s former CSO, Joseph Sullivan, was sentenced to a few years of probation and fined $50,000 for his function within the 2016 coverup of the rideshare firm’s information breach. Extra lately in November, the SEC filed a landmark lawsuit in opposition to SolarWinds and its CISO, Timothy Brown, for fraud and inside management failures associated to the corporate’s 2020 cyberattack.
The SolarWinds case particularly marks a major turning level in the best way the federal authorities treats cybersecurity incidents, because it opens the door for firms to be held chargeable for cybersecurity-related misconduct similar to they might for insider coaching or different severe monetary crimes.
Transferring into 2024, CISOs will proceed to face more and more stringent business regulatory necessities and heightened media scrutiny alongside the already current stress of an understaffed workforce and tightening budgets. Many safety leaders wish to implement extra sturdy compliance and governance controls with out having to undertake a separate level answer. CNAPPs will help by performing as a centralized answer the place safety groups can constantly map their environments’ configurations to their required business laws. This additionally helps drive constant safety requirements throughout all multicloud and hybrid environments whereas additionally offering complete visibility and reporting for safety admin groups.
When evaluating cloud safety, take into account a unified CNAPP answer
As CISOs consider their cloud safety methods in 2024, vendor consolidation is a high precedence. CISOs desire a holistic safety answer that may ship code-to-cloud safety throughout their total cloud property while not having to juggle the overhead that comes with managing a number of level options. By adopting a unified CNAPP answer that consolidates beforehand siloed safety instruments beneath one umbrella, firms acquire two key advantages.
First, CNAPPs drive extra holistic protections in your cloud functions and infrastructure by integrating insights throughout CSPM, cloud workload safety platforms (CWPPs), DevOps safety, and cloud infrastructure entitlement administration (CIEM). Not solely does this ship deeper, extra contextualized safety learnings, however it additionally permits firms to get to a spot of proactive threat administration during which they will map all potential assault paths throughout cloud-based functions, digital machines, containers, information, cloud workloads, and extra. From there, they will extra simply determine future dangers and remediate them earlier than attackers have the possibility to capitalize on the vulnerability. This can be a important step change in the best way firms method cloud safety because it permits them to proactively perceive their diploma of threat throughout all the cloud property and reply accordingly
Secondly, CNAPPs act as a bridge between developer groups and safety admins. Builders can use CNAPPs as a typical dashboard to view the safety insurance policies they should embed of their code. Some CNAPPs supply this as a bolt-on functionality, nonetheless at Microsoft, that is completed by native device integrations with Github, Azure DevOps, and prolonged to GitLab as properly. This ensures that builders can function of their most popular device of selection whereas nonetheless following safety greatest practices. Likewise, safety admins can use CNAPPs to embed safety within the code from the beginning and to make sure all related insurance policies are set and applied following business requirements.
Defender for Cloud, Microsoft’s CNAPP answer, makes use of its main menace intelligence and the size of 65 trillion each day safety indicators to empower safety groups with the most recent insights. This ensures that safety admins are outfitted with the insights they should determine present assault vectors and remediate them based on identified greatest practices.
Finally, as CISOs look to guage their cloud safety methods in 2024, there are a number of vital elements to think about. Because the definition of cloud safety grows extra nuanced and granular, CISOs want an end-to-end answer that may ship complete, proactive protections from code to the cloud whereas additionally integrating vital capabilities like governance and compliance. In addition they want a streamlined technique to make the most of the most recent advances in AI and machine studying to make sure safety groups can transfer on the pace of attackers. The suitable unified CNAPP answer will help CISOs evolve their cloud safety technique to fulfill essentially the most urgent wants of at present.
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