Security Enablement for Cloud Platform and Application Excellence
This is the fourth blog in a five-part series from TAG Cyber that informs developers, cloud platform engineers, and security practitioners of the challenges and opportunities of cloud security-as-code. This blog focuses on challenging security operations and compliance practitioners to understand how their mandates can be realized through continuous control of their cloud environments.
Author: David Neuman, Senior Analyst, TAG Cyber
Research Coordinator: Nick Wainwright, Research Analyst, TAG Cyber
As cloud adoption continues to accelerate, security operations (SecOps) and governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) practitioners are grappling with the challenge of securing their cloud environments while meeting compliance mandates. The complexity of cloud environments and the constantly evolving threat landscape have made this task increasingly challenging. In this blog, we will explore how continuous control of cloud environments can help security operations and compliance practitioners deliver greater protection from cyber-attacks and misuse while enabling adjacent teams and business outcomes with Concourse Labs.
The challenge
Traditional security operations and compliance practices have relied on periodic assessments and audits to ensure the security and compliance of IT systems. However, in the cloud environment, traditional methods are ill-equipped to handle the scale and complexity of cloud infrastructures. Cloud environments are dynamic and constantly changing, with new workloads, applications, and services being deployed daily. This makes it difficult for security operations and compliance practitioners to maintain an accurate inventory of their assets and ensure that they are secured and compliant.
Industry-leading practices in security operations and compliance recognize the need for continuous control of cloud environments. Continuous control involves continuously monitoring and enforcing security and compliance controls in real time. This approach ensures that security and compliance controls are consistently applied across cloud environments, regardless of the pace of change.
Continuous control involves the use of automation and orchestration to manage and enforce security and compliance controls. Automation enables security and compliance controls to be deployed and managed at scale, reducing the risk of human error and ensuring consistent application of controls. Orchestration enables security and compliance controls to be integrated into the development and deployment pipelines, enabling them to be applied early and often.
Continuous control of cloud environments enables security operations and compliance practitioners to achieve several benefits. First and foremost, it enables them to maintain an accurate inventory of their cloud assets, ensuring they are always secured and compliant. Second, it enables them to detect and respond to security incidents and compliance violations in real time, reducing the time to resolution and minimizing the impact of incidents. Third, it enables them to enforce security and compliance controls consistently across cloud environments, reducing the risk of security breaches and compliance violations.
Turning challenges into opportunities
Cloud security-as-code is an approach to security and compliance that involves defining and managing security and compliance controls as code, using familiar coding languages such as YAML and JSON. This approach enables security and compliance controls to be treated like any other software code and allows for automated deployment, testing, and management of controls.
This allows continuous control by automating the deployment and management of security and compliance controls. By defining controls as code, they can be deployed automatically and consistently across cloud environments, ensuring they are always in place and working as intended. This reduces the risk of human error and ensures that controls are always up-to-date and effective.
Cloud security-as-code also enables security operations and compliance practitioners to detect and respond to security incidents and compliance violations in real time. Integrating security and compliance controls into the development and deployment pipelines can be applied early and often, reducing the risk of incidents and enabling rapid response to incidents when they occur.
One of the key advantages of cloud security-as-code is its ability to scale and adapt to the dynamic nature of cloud environments. Cloud environments are constantly changing, with new workloads, applications, and services being deployed on a regular basis. Traditional security and compliance approaches are ill-equipped to handle this pace of change, but cloud security-as-code enables controls to be automatically deployed and managed at scale, ensuring that they are always in place and effective.
It also enables security operations and compliance practitioners to work more effectively with development and operations teams, enabling them to embed security and compliance controls into the development and deployment pipelines. This approach reduces the friction between security and development teams and enables them to work together more effectively to deliver secure and compliant applications and services.
Concourse Labs is a leading provider of cloud security-as-code solutions that enable continuous control of cloud environments. Concourse Labs provides a unified platform for managing cloud risks, with automated cloud policy management, risk assessment, and compliance reporting capabilities. With Concourse Labs, security operations and compliance practitioners can define and enforce cloud security policies as code and gain real-time visibility into cloud risks and compliance posture.
Summary
Cloud security-as-code achieves continuous control of cloud environments by automating the deployment and management of security and compliance controls, enabling real-time detection and response to incidents, scaling and adapting to the dynamic nature of cloud environments, and enabling collaboration between security, development, and operations teams. Concourse Labs provides a comprehensive cloud security-as-code solution that enables security operations and compliance practitioners to achieve continuous control and deliver more excellent protection from cyber-attacks and misuse while enabling adjacent teams and business outcomes.
About TAG Cyber
TAG Cyber is a trusted cyber security research analyst firm, providing unbiased industry insights and recommendations to security solution providers and Fortune 100 enterprises. Founded in 2016 by Dr. Edward Amoroso, former SVP/CSO of AT&T, the company bucks the trend of pay-for-play research by offering in-depth research, market analysis, consulting, and personalized content based on hundreds of engagements with clients and non-clients alike—all from a former practitioner perspective.
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